Poetry reviews: Stewart Sanderson | Taylor Strickland | Dorothy Lawrenson | Medha Singh
Exploring ideas of otherness is a central concern in all four of these new poetry collections, writes Stuart Kelly
I should have expected that the answer would be “Caledonian Antisyzygy”: what else might explain “the very combination of opposites” whereby this culture unceasingly ochones the marginalisation of poetry while at the same time producing more and more of it? It seems to me the long shadow of the Scottish Renaissance still hangs over these collections in other ways as well.
.jpeg?trim=267,0,1171,0&crop=&width=640&quality=65)
Stewart Sanderson’s collection Weathershaker won me over before I opened it. The titular poem’s meaning is defined on the back as being “of unknown meaning” in the Scottish National Dictionary. The collection is unified by lost languages, indecipherable scripts and the difficulty of making sense. But this is not merely an academic proposition, since the overwhelming melancholy of tone suggests the poet equally startled and grieved by the contemporary: “a swirl of signs beyond our vision’s gleaming / and past wit’s power to limit to one meaning”. The full rhyme coupled with two alliterations shows Sanderson has the technical skills; so when he does develop concrete poems and a neat Oulipo piece it is justified. It is also curious to note a kind of long theological hangover, which this shares with the other titles under consideration (Sanderson’s “Vespers”, part of a sequence, is a delight in this regard).
I must confess to being less taken with Taylor Strickland’s Dwell Time. There must be an understandable temptation to try many forms in a full length debut, but the risk is a kind of inadvertent flippancy. Why is the first person singular capitalised in some and left as ‘i’ in others? Why do we sometimes get “and” and then “&” – and an ampersand does not place you next to Berryman. These are not pettifogging points. Anything which glitches stops the reader reading. One poem – “Hymn” is homage to Edwin Morgan’s 1965 “Opening the Cage” but using only seven variations of seven, unlike Morgan’s sonnet-esque 14.
There is also a piece, “The Air Debris”, subtitled “After Don Paterson” which is made up of punctuation marks, presumably from an erased text. It is neither meaningful nor funny; and there is no explanatory endnote, surprisingly since others are glossed. Re-reading it, I noticed a particular kind of tic or trick across the poems. They have riffs on similar or similar sounding words – so “the evergreen of memory is reversed / to never-green, a nothing-nest / so similar to nothingness”. Or in a poem predicated on Ossian, we get “every battle had a champion / and they were champions at battle”; in another “a voyeur… when all this time I thought I was a voyager”. And in a Portuguese set piece, “No more saudade but saúde”. It strikes me as a technique trying very hard to sound like poetry.
Dorothy Lawrenson’s Given To The River is more modest and deeper at the same time. Of particular value are her Scots poems, with a work like The Differ both showing and being about how Scots has an expressive capacity that is unavailable in English. There is an extended sequence across the collection, “Rax me that poem”, which works as almost vignettes of a mordant ars poetica. I especially liked “You don’t know you have rules / Until someone breaks them” – a twist on the old “but Picasso could paint properly when he wanted to” saw – but the conclusion of that part – “She gives you a present of polkadot socks. // He cuts his fingernails in public. // They centre your poem.” has a delicious wryness. There is an “erased poem” here as well in the form of “Epitaph for a Tragedian”, said aspiring dramatist being William McGonagall. WN Herbert has some great McGonagall-esque comic poems; Lawrenson turns it to pathos and a strange revelation that there were some good phrases buried in those unending, unscanning lines.
Medha Singh’s collection Afterbody is, to me, the one that needs to be read at the slowest pace. That is not a criticism. The extended lines – some reaching ultra-Alexandrine lengths – require patience to parse. Curiously, they are not languorous, perhaps because there is a constant eruption of violence into them: of all the books considered this has most to say about political and familial horrors. A line like “Now you’re gone, and I have no enemy. I am just like you” is chilling in itself and doubly so given the title is “Daddy” (a clear nod to Plath). It is a blood-soaked book: indeed, a sequence “Viscera: Blood Fragments” was, with “Painting Our Time”, one of the two I re-read most. There are moment of eroticism and of quiet epiphany, but the major trajectory is learning to love against the bloodiness. One poem, part of “Viscera” has the poet carrying Great Works of Literature and “seeing glimpses of all their faces in the faces / of alien men, and for that, wanting to marry / all of them” but ends with a kick “all this while / being the other.”
Otherness is critical across these collections. Singh is from Delhi, based in Edinburgh; Strickland is American and lives in Glasgow, Lawrenson went from Dundee to Texas and back to Edinburgh; Sanderson is Glaswegian and most of his poems are about the otherness of his home country. Maybe the “new generation” cliché can be abandoned. The late Angus Calder always loved calling Scots “the mongrel nation”.
Weathershaker, by Stuart Sanderson, Tapsalteerie, £12; Dwell Time, by Taylor Strickland, Tapsalteerie, £12; Given To The River, by Dorothy Lawrenson, Drunk Muse Press, £10; Afterbody, by Medha Singh, Blue Diode, £10
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.