“For a long time,” writes Kathleen Jamie in her afterword to The Keelie Hawk (Picador £12.99), “I’ve wanted to write a suite of poems entirely in Scots.” If your first thought is “But I don’t speak Scots”, worry not: the poems have stripped-back, prose English translations on their facing page.
One of the many fascinations of this book is the tug between both versions, as if you’re looking at the workings of two complicated clocks keeping the same time, but differently.
The first stanza of The Speugs – “Wha’ll tak tent nou/ whan they fluchter doon,/ thae wee broon speugs?” – is Englished as: Who’ll pay heed now when they flutter down, the little brown sparrows?
If the Scots here is acrobatic, the English is timid as a dowager. The contrast highlights how a poem’s sound means as much as the sense of the words, carrying meaning through words chosen for their capacity to galvanise language out of dullness and complacency.
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“Encountering Scots in an English-language world is like seeing wildflowers flourish in cracks in the pavement,” writes Jamie. As one of the very best contemporary writers about the natural world, her poems here are vividly alive to landscape and weather, and use a haiku-like precision to home in on detail. Whaup reads, in its entirety:
“Gin the speirin cry/ o thon muirlaun whaup/ met nae repone/ bar the wind’s cauld souch/ whitten kinnae poetry wad ye scrieve?”
Between this and the English version – if the questioning cry of the moorland curlew met no reply but the wind’s cold sigh, what kind of poetry would you write? – is a fascinating chafe. This is a rich and beguiling collection that also offers a puzzler’s chance to decode the Scots all by yourself. Interested? Try this:
“Like a ghaist’s bane/ a lane clood/ drifts eastwart, seawart ...”
A strain of impish humour underwrites the poems of Claudine Toutoungi’s Emotional Support Horse (Carcanet, £11.99). “You have given me a far-off skew-whiff glint. You have made me unnervingly awry,” writes the narrator in Medical Notes, and this sense of living at an angle to one’s life runs throughout this third collection from one of Britain’s most distinctive poetry voices.
Perhaps most striking about this work is a kind of Dadaist playfulness rarely found in Irish poetry – perhaps closest would be the poems of Paul Durcan, with their absurdist propositions often packing core emotional truths. This collection’s lighter moments (We Couldn’t Get the Parts to Write This Poem, for example, with its good, fun opening line: “Our metaphor container ship is dry-docked”) nicely counterpoint powerful poems of grief, such as May Day in Marbella:
“ ... Time/ slipped and the sea oh my God, going for an Oscar/ with its splashy theatrics, its Pinteresque pauses –/ how it dries and forgets its line, but always / comes back, which stings, because you can’t.”
These poems thrive on their images. We Interrupt This Darkness begins: “shuffling across the carpark from the pool in my dry robe/ like a damp, disconsolate Cistercian ...” This clicked-into-place rightness accommodates accuracy and depth, as in this description of wind in Shortest Day:
“The wind has a lot to say. It is long-winded. Old roué. Old reprobate./ Never knowingly not taking its valedictory lap around the garden.”
There’s great charm to this writing, neatly balanced by poems of gut-wrenching, affective beauty, such as The Substitutes, which begins, “All my alternative mothers line up in the courtyard to pass me along”, ending:
“ ... I see her – my mother/ billowing in a nightie, her beautiful face looking huffy and strained./ Where have you been? she asks when I reach her. You’ve been ages./ I’ve been waiting. Where have you been?”
As befits a poet who also makes short films, the poems in Pat Boran’s Hedge School (Dedalus, €12.50) favour close-up detail of the local, natural world. A last thatched roof, the single pollinating bee, a “small bird singing in a tree” – from such precisely observed particulars comes the sense of a poet in tune with both natural environment and social world.
These are poems that make no bones about their local allegiances, with placenames, friends’ names, dedications, and depictions of a close world closely attended to. If wider implications – war, the passage of time, the succour of friendship, the imperilled world – occasionally intrude a little too pointedly (“while we pass by in a relative blur/ slaves to industry.” – The Statues of Emo Court), other poems handle their resonance more gently and personally.
The best poems here allow the recollected experience to speak for itself. In The High Window, for example, the memory of climbing a four-storey ladder to retrieve lost keys becomes a study in close-up recall, with fear and daring balancing out, the poem reliving not only that episode but a wider adolescent anxiety, ending:
“the huge dark craft of the place/ lurching and leaning/ the river that had ceased/ to flow through it/ a hundred years before/ now roaring in my ears.”
Summer in Baldoyle nicely braids a 200-year-old description from Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of Ireland of “12 children attending a hedge school in Baldoyle” with youths “outside the Applegreen,/ beside the Racecourse chip shop, along the low wall/ of St Laurence’s Church”.
In that hedge, functioning as symbol, habitat, historic boundary or shelter, and beyond which can also lie “wild lands” (Beyond the Hedge), Boran finds a series of encouraging lessons about connectedness and attention.
Not least because of their focus on competitive athletics, Gustav Parker Hibbett brings an energetic new voice to Irish poetry in their debut, High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee, €12.99), shortlisted for this year’s TS Eliot Prize. Originally from New Mexico, Hibbett is currently working on a PhD at TCD and this collection nicely fuses responses to a Stateside cultural landscape (African America, Joni Mitchell, the Pledge of Allegiance) and the Irish physical landscape (a west Cork farm, the National Gallery, Inis Meáin).
Thematic hybridity is endemic here: the question of belonging is fundamental, with various identities as queer poet, black poet and displaced poet explored in images of jumping, flying or failing. Language plays with both flighty significance and restrained flatness (perhaps to mimic the body as it runs up to and then high jumps?) As High Jump as Divination notes, “you either leave/ with wings or you stay human.”
The contemporaneity of the cultural references (Laura Marling, Fleabag, text emojis, Lianne La Havas etc) may prove refreshing or grating depending, perhaps, on the reader’s age: those hoping for news of the Reformation (and not Idris Elba’s TV character) in Luther will hope in vain. But underneath the here-and-now runs a seam of probing and mature self-questioning that lifts these poems beyond the currency of the quotidian into a knottier lyric intensity, as in the lines, “I am the sort of man/ an artist wears to sing in” (Joni Mitchell Dresses Up as Me), or the delicately self-scalding, closing lines of From a West Cork Farm in Winter:
“ ... When the rest/ had gone to sleep, I went out in the starless/ night and sang. In the wind and rain, my voice/ was patient, gritty, though I doubt it carried.”
