Interview: John Glenday, poet

Published on Sunday 1 November 2009 12:48

Poet John Glenday talks to Susan Mansfield about his latest work, a distillation of 14 years' devotion to his craft

Poet John Glenday

'I WORK exceedingly slow," says John Glenday, by way of explaining why his new poetry collection, Grain, has taken 14 years to arrive. "If I'd been an elephant, I'd have had several children by now."

Yet, by all accounts, it is worth waiting for. Grain is also his first book with a major publisher (Picador – earlier books The Apple Ghost and Undark were with Peterloo). His editor, fellow poet Don Paterson, is at the vanguard of a host of eminent writers who believe Glenday is at last getting the recognition he deserves.

Unassuming and quietly spoken, he says only that he is happier with this book than any other. Which is important, given that 90 per cent of what he writes never sees the light of day. "Better that way than churning out books that make me slightly uneasy when I look back at them five or ten years later," he says.

Grain is a mature, distilled volume, at times delicately lyrical, at times playful or surreal. Meanings shift and unfold. A poem might take as a starting point a tin of peaches or an etching of a line of trees, but it always reaches towards something more. "When I first wrote, I thought poetry was a spontaneous, instant thing. I realised that over the years you work towards what the meaning is," he says.

"If I was to compare writing poetry to another profession, it would be something like archaeology, looking extremely closely often at very focused things. But what you want to explain isn't really the posthole you're digging into, or the fragment of bone you found in a cist, what you're really interested in is what it tells you about the lives of the people who lived then. All poems are really about humanity."

Glenday would have us really look at the world. His interest is both wide-ranging (from the creatures of the oceans to the invention of the tin opener) and deep. "I believe what I call inspiration just means looking at things really carefully, really seeing things, not taking things for granted. There are so many things out there that help us see more than themselves," he says.

The making of a poem is a slow transformation, involving many rewrites. "The problem is stopping, I'm like (the painter] Gwen John, adding finishing touches as the paintings are being carried out the door," he says.

Yet when he speaks about his work, he has the unhurried spirit of a true craftsman. He has never wanted to be anything other than a poet. If his output is smaller than some, so be it. The work we get will be the best.

He decided to be a poet in his teens. He says: "A lot of people do, but I never grew out of it. I should have matured into a banker or an accountant, but never got round to it. Every job I've had is really something I've had to keep me while I'm writing."

At university, he studied English before switching to psychiatric nursing, and now works as an addictions counsellor in the Highlands, where he lives with his wife Erika and their five children. But he retains connections to the vibrant group of writers he met in Dundee in the 1990s, including Paterson, Kathleen Jamie, Robert Crawford, John Burnside and Bill Duncan.

Looking back, he is fascinated by the fact that he chose his vocation so young, and how it feels like a synthesis of his own parents: his mother, articulate, creative, a voracious reader; and his father, who read little but loved the natural world and taught his son to look. He describes his poetry and his day job as "two halves of my life". They don't meet and he likes it that way. The poetry has to force its way out through a demanding profession and a busy family life.

"There's nothing worse for me than having the whole day to write, sitting in a quiet library for five hours. I'd much rather write in a really noisy cafe for ten minutes between trains with a scrap of paper in my pocket. Poetry is about expressing yourself within the limits," he says. Poets, he says, have to be forced to write, because what they do is difficult. What they're trying to get to grips with is the stuff of life, the nature of the world, what it is to be human. For a moment he speaks with urgency, balancing the meticulousness of craftsmanship.

"The world is middle-aged – like Homer Simpson – we're halfway through. For 4.5 billion years there was nothing but atmosphere. I'm just here for – if I'm lucky – three score years and 15, when I'll have some understanding and ability to communicate with other people. While I'm here, I've got to see everything that I can and understand everything as best I can." v

Grain, by John Glenday (Picador, 8.99), will be launched 25 November, 7.30pm, Scottish Poetry Library. www.spl.org.uk

This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on November 1, 2009