Reviews Bubbling Up

The first print review of The Ambulance Box is in! It's part of a piece in Magma 44, where Rosie Shepperd reviews it alongside Paula Meehan’s Painting Rain (Carcanet) and River Wolton’s The Purpose of Your Visit (Smith/Doorstop Books). The review is thorough and extremely positive. Here's a headline quote:

delights readers with a dance through images and words that express powerful visionary and and spiritual experiences.

The issue also contains reviews of several friends' books: Ben Wilkinson reviews Rob A Mackenzie's The Opposite of Cabbage enthusiastically alongside no lesser names than Mark Doty and John Agard; there's a mixed review of Lorraine Mariner's fresh quirky and moving Furniture that nonetheless includes some high praise indeed; and another fine poet, Claire Crowther, provides a very positive review of Polly Clark's Farewell My Lovely.

Click the cover image above to go to the page for this issue of the magazine, though you can't read the review online. It's a great encouragement to be reviewed so warmly in such a good publication.

"Rapturous even in despair"

Many thanks to Robert Peake for his sensitive and enthusiastic review of The Ambulance Box. As Robert says, he and I share the grief of having lost a newborn son, so his assessment of the book is of particular significance to me. Here's a taste:

Sentimentality and easy words seem as though they might never have been invented in the remarkable worldview Andrew hands us in this book.

Robert's blog is well worth a look. He too writes movingly about his loss and intelligently about poetry. As you'll have seen below, I'll be stopping by his site for my virtual book tour on 8 July. I think that promises to be a very special leg of the journey.

Another Review!

Another review! It seems to be my collection's weekend for reviews, especially ones with a HappenStance connection: Matt Merritt has just posted a wonderfully thoughtful, warm and generous appreciation of The Ambulance Box (the first link above). I'm indebted to him.

Matt and I will be reading with Rob A Mackenzie and James W Wood at Word Power Bookshop in Edinburgh on Saturday 20th June 2009 12.00 noon - 1.00pm. I'm very much looking forward to it.

Reviews

The previous two posts collide in Helena Nelson's generous review ofThe Ambulance Box and Rob A Mackenzie's The Opposite of Cabbage over on the HappenStance blog. It's my first blog review! (Although I've already gained a five-star Amazon customer review!) There are also reviews in the pipline or promised from Matt Merritt, Tony Williams and James W Wood for ONE Magazine.

Back to Front?

There's an extensive, thoughtful and very positive review of the sampler over at Jim Murdoch's ever stimulating blog The Truth about Lies. Jim comments on each of the poems in turn, as well as on general aspects of the pamphlet as an object and collection. This is the paragraph that most interests me:

As a poet myself I'm inclined to have my meanings at the forefront of my poems, not that I discount feelings but they've always tended to be something of an aside with me. Philip's poetry, to my mind, concentrates on feelings and the meanings are put on the back burner. These are poems you can't read, tick the box – Yeah, I get that one – and then pass onto the next one. ... A star has exploded and these are fragments rippling away, getting further and further apart, remnants; they meant something when they were whole. Now they are not meaningless but they mean less and Philip is desperately trying to cling onto that meaning. The feelings are clear and unambiguous however.

Always fascinating to see how others read your work, isn't it? I'm interested that Jim thinks I put meaning "on the back burner". I'd certainly agree that meaning is not "at the forefront" of my work as it is for him. That's perhaps the fundamental difference in our poetics: I don't discount the skill and craft of writing something with meaning at the forefront--perhaps I even do it occasionally--but that kind of poetry has never interested me as much as more layered, multivalent poetry has. So that's often what I aim for: something that layers meaning; that can access a sense beyond the surface meaning; that will draw the reader back to discover new meaning on subsequent readings.

I wouldn't call that putting meaning "on the back burner". To my ears, that phrase sounds a touch pejorative in this context. However, Jim is anything but negative about the pamphlet, so I guess he didn't mean it that way. In fact, he says the sampler is

a collection of poems by a man trying to make sense out of something that will never make sense, trying to imbue words with meanings they were never intended to hold and, where that fails, creating new words to try and get his point across.

Absolutely spot on. This is perhaps where we come to the emotions in the poetic. The poems in question being largely about grief and bereavement,* it's hardly surprising that emotion should strike a sensitive and intelligent reader as being at the forefront. Nonetheless, Jim acknoweldges the attempt to make sense (ie, meaning) out of it.

What we have here is the collision or collusion of meaning and emotion. Writing poetry has probably always been to me a means of thinking through my emotions, even more vitally so since I began writing about losing my son, Aidan. And I mean thinking through in a double sense: making sense of my emotional life; and using my emotions as a stimulus to thought. That's not the sum of my poetics, but it's probably a central part. After all, we're talking about an important aspect of the way I'm made: a reasonably intelligent/intellectual individual but, at the same time, uncommonly emotional for a man.**

Thinking again about the relative positioning of meaning and emotion in my poetry, I'd like to suggest that I'm not backgrounding meaning but foregrounding possibilities in the language. Fundamentally, poetry is about language: what we can do with it and what we can do to get beyond it.*** The poem's meaning is a function of the poem as an instance of language--a language event, if I can put it like that--with all the complexity of interaction between the text, the writer and the reader(s) that that implies. That too is a central part of what I'm trying to do. I'm not saying I apply this understanding in the most sophisticated way, but it's definitely mixed into the mortar.

Some of these thoughts have been rattling round in my wee heid for a while, but it's taken Jim's appraisal to get them out into the open, slightly random though they are. My thanks to him for providing the impetus and, above all, for taking the time to read and review the pamphlet so thoroughly.

*This holds for "Tonguefire Night" too in ways I didn't know and could never have known when I wrote it, although I understood at some level the cultural grief and bereavement that it touches on.

**Though not especially sensitive to emotional atmosphere, strangely enough. Aren't we humans complicated sometimes?

***"Poetry is only there to frame the silence", as Alice Oswald said in an interview.

Sampler Review

Sorlil has very kindly reviewed my sampler on her blog. As far as I know, it's the first review of this pamphlet and I'm very pleased with what she has to say about it. She comments:

"These poems are unlike most of the poems I read these days, there is something very different and at times uncomfortable about them which certainly makes them stand out and difficult to forget",

which is the kind of thing any writer would want a reader or reviewer to say about their work. I'll be interested to see whether there are many comments on her post.

Meanwhile, why not contact HappenStance and order a copy?

100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems

One of the questions that one always faces with an anthology is what is its rationale, its purpose and aim? Like its team mates 100 Favourite Scottish Poems and 100 Favourite Scottish Poems to Read Aloud, 100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems, edited by Alistair Findlay, hints at a kind of democratising of the canon in its title and cover design, which is reminiscent of the earlier edition of The Nation's Favourite Poems in typeface and layout. However, although the 20 of the 100 Favourite Scottish Poems (which, presumably, nobody would ever dream of reading aloud) were chosen through a Radio Scotland listener poll, the other 200 are, as far as I can tell, chosen by single editors.

So, if we don't have a popular poll, what do we have? One man's take on how poetry has addressed an endlessly popular subject, perhaps. Findlay instinctively sides with the crowd, which, he says is "really only another name for 'the people'." Perhaps it was an awareness of the disjunct between his role as sole arbiter of what's in and what's out and the requirements of his Marxism that led him to the rather odd decision to number not the pages but only the poems and state that they are "in an order of reading proposed by the editor", which is to state the obvious, really.

But what you really want to know about is the poems. Readers of this blog will know that I'm no football fanatic, though I confess I'm not entirely averse to watching the odd Aberdeen or Scotland game and have been known to kick a ball about. All of which makes me pretty reasonably well-placed to judge the book as an anthology of poems without becoming misty-eyed about the footballing aspect or writing it off in anti-football disgust.

If you're looking for a golden treasury, go to Palgrave. For my taste, there are a few too many paeans to great footballers and I find many of them dull poems. One notable exception in that genre is Matthew Fitt's wonderful "Jim Leighton", a poem that, certainly read aloud (as it is on The Jewel Box), would curely make the hardest footiephobe concede that there must be beauty and heroism in the game.

But don't just turn over to the black and white film on the other channel. There is a lot more to this book than the footballing hall of fame in verse. If it contains a good handful of poems that will interest only the enthusiast, it also contains at least as much that's well worth the general reader's attention. Football runs deep, deep in the Scottish psyche and male Scottish society, and the real strength of Findlay's anthology is that it presents us with a portrait of that deep place in a more profound and, certainly, more entertaining way than any academic study could.

Every aspect of football's appeal is here: the highs and lows, the tribalism and sectarianism, the communal experience and the shared memories, the inextricable link between the sport and Scottish tribal identities. The book shows how far back this goes: the earliest poem is a quatrain from 1580, and one of the most pleasurable discoveries for me--there were plenty, I assure you--was the exerpt from "The Christmass Bawing of Monimusk, 1739", proof that the divines of Scotland have never been Calvinist dourness through and through.

Sectarianism, is of course, unavoidable. Findlay does an admirable job in this regard. "The Fields of Athenry" and "The Sash My Father Wore" sit side by side in the book--could you do otherwise?--and there's plenty sharp, funny and poignant commentary on the sectarian question from several of the poets. Dennis O'Donnell captures so much of the ambivalence, threat and fear in his "Fid. Def." (another poem that stood out for me), while Robert Crawford's "Identity League" sums up the nation's carnaptious obsessions with typical Crawfordian wit and invention.

It's interesting that, although the book includes a good deal by many of our leading poets, it's often far from their best work and that many of the most interesting and effective poems in Findlay's choice are not those by the biggest names. Perhaps there's something in football that raises the game of the lesser writers and maybe the bulk of the greats, MacDiarmid not least, have missed what's most poetic about it. There are also a few odd choices in Findlays list, poems that are shoehorned into either the rubric of "Scottish" or "football", but he does a good job of defending them in his spiky introduction.

Despite this, depsite its slight uncertainties about canon building and democracy, and despite overdoing the eulogies from a general reader's point of view, this book is a lively, entertaining and emotionally informative anthology of poetry. If you want to understand Scotland today, you need to read this kind of stuff, not just the academic and semi-academic analyses of where we are and how we got here. Findlay has done us a service in collecting it between these covers.

Singing from a Strange Hymn Sheet

Just finished reading Alistair Findlay's The Love Songs of John Knox, a sophisticated but hugely entertaining collection. It's not often a book of poems has me chuckling aloud to myself almost every page. Even rarer is the collection I pass round colleagues at my day job to watch them chuckle and giggle aloud.

Findlay takes us for a surreal and manic spin through the Scottish Reformation and 21st century Scotland. In numerous poems, Knox lands in various 21st century settings--appearing on Newsnight (not, you note, Newsnicht) and This is Your Life, watching Celtic play Porto or visiting the seamier side of Livingston. He also writes to various figures (including Calvin, Elizabeth I of England and Lenin) and addresses the poet. Some poems cover the Reformation ground alone, albeit usually with the same revved-up style. And there are plenty other voices besides Knox's: "the poet", Knox's two wives and his daughter, Lenin's (yes, he writes back), Mary Queen of Scots' ladies in waiting, even a 16th century police report as well as the various voices of parodies and pastiches.

For the most part, the writing is a very conversational style of free verse, but a few poems (the Eliot and Milton parodies in particular) opt for a more formal tone. The language throughout veers between 16th century Scots, 21st century Scots and standard English not only across poems but within individual pieces, stanzas and even lines. Some phrases and lines come directly from Knox or his contemporaries. Indeed, some of the pieces consist solely of such lines, which feels a bit like channel surfing on a short-wave radio into the past. One poem, "God and Revolution--Knox and Lenin's Lines to the Faithful" juxtaposes phrases from the two gentlmen named.

It all makes for a wonderfully distruptive linguistic texture. Easily readable for most Scots, I reckon, as Findlay is careful with his archaisms. And not unreflective of how many of us speak, aside from the 16th century rhetoric. If it's a speech-based poetic, it's a rich and complex one, capable of subtleties and textures a more resolutely street-based approach might miss.

This book could easily reach out to people who don't usually read poetry. Sure, they'd miss the smattering of literary jokes, but there's much else besides to admire and enjoy. It's also pretty essential reading, given how central to the nature of Scotland are the events, obsessions and figures it deals with.

Knox often gets the blame for just about everything that's identified as being wrong with the Scottish psyche, particularly the male version. Yes, Scotland has changed immeasurably since Knox (where hasn't?), but, every now and then, the disturbing sense arises that Knox's rhetoric is not as alien to today's Scottish society as it ought to be. Findlay simply lets that sense arise without making too much of it, which is part of the book's strength.

Nonetheless, don't think for a minute that Findlay's Knox is the soor ploom beloved of much Scottish social comment. Findlay is a Marxist, which gives him obvious respect for Knox the revolutionary. That's crucial to the success of his endeavour, because his Knox emerges as a far more complex character than the dour Calvinist we're usually subjected to. Neither traditional secular Knox-bashing, hardline Calvinist Knox-worship nor mainstream Protestant Knox-ambivalence could have yeilded the gloriously anarchic reading of Scottish history and society that this collection offers.

If the sequence has a significant weakness, it's that Findlay slips into summarising Reformation history too much. When he combines this with wit, comedy and surrealism--as he very often does--it's part of the pleasure. But, in the odd poem where those are lacking, the considerable virr and smeddum that characterise the sequence dissipate and we're left with rather thin brose. Findlay should have trusted his readers more and left out those pieces. More to the point, his editors should have cut them.

The question some might ask is whether this book will translate to a non-Scottish audience. It probably won't, which is a shame in that it could be a good one for introducing people to certain aspects of Scottish society and culture. It's not just a matter of language, because the work assumes a fair amount of background knowledge, as does all good, rooted poetry. But, on the other hand, we need to talk to and about ourselves as much as any nation. It's a crucial part of understanding ourselves, understanding where we've come from and where we're headed. Whether or not anybody else understands what we're saying, seldom has it been this much fun.