Robert Nye on three new volumes of Scottish poetry

Published on Thursday 20 August 2009 17:41

SOMEWHERE IN ONE OF HIS stories, Malcolm Lowrie speaks of reading his contemporaries and wondering what the hell they are going on about. The point is that this is his basic reaction to their work – a feeling of simply not understanding what has made them write at all. I confess that this is a feeling I have often felt myself.

It is a relief to be able to report that I don't feel it more than half the time in the case of the poems of John Burnside. His new book, The Hunt in the Forest (Cape Poetry, 10), makes it immediately clear that he writes poetry because he has something to say which probably could not be said in any other way. Here is the beginning of the first poem in the book, entitled Learning to Swim:

All of a sudden and mostly by surprise

was how my cousin thought it should be done,

the body unlearning its weight as it plunged to the black

of the deep end and came, at a stroke,

to the friendship of water

Note the accuracy of "unlearning its weight", the pleasant pun contained in "at a stroke", and the way the diving in and then swimming movement of the lines comes to a glittering stop with the only ostensibly poetic phrase, those four words "the friendship of water". This is good stuff, language which enacts what it describes, words working naturally for their keep, and the rest of the poem is just as good if not better, becoming a sort of shy metaphor for the human condition, as well as a little swimming lesson.

When Burnside writes like this it is easy enough to see that here is a real poet working somewhere close to the top of his bent. I'd list the book's other successes as Winter, Rain, The Symposium and Documentary , with some moving lines called "Uley Blue" about a dead badger not far behind them. There are also three good love poems, spread at intervals, all entitled Amor Vincit Omnia, the samenesss of title being perhaps to rub the point in.

Romantic love and the nature of identity are Burnside's essential themes. That, and swimming – there's another useful poem about this activity right at the book's end. Ignore the volume's blurb which would have you believe that these are poems of hunting and predation, and that they all have something to do with a painting by Uccello. This is the sort of evasive nonsense that poets spout when they are persuaded back into the limelight. I shall hope that John Burnside recovers and returns to the dim forest where his best poems come from.

In Zero (Polygon, 9.99), Brian McCabe's muse is mathematics, Our Lady of Numbers, with poems that deal wittily with some extraordinary and eccentric inventions. Pythagoras would have loved it. Speaking as someone who the grammar school wouldn't allow even to sit the O-level maths exam ("It would be a waste of public money," they told my father), I must say I feel thoroughly out of my depth when confronted by such brilliance.

Still, there are jokes here to which I can respond, notably the idea of the newsreader who has to report on "throur", a brand new number introduced by the government. There is also a monologue by James Joyce's hero Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake, 1600) which is even quite passionate in its understated way. Above all, for the innumerate, there are a couple of attractive variations on jingles, the first about those green bottles hanging on the wall, the other beginning:

All those men who went to Mow,

went to mow a meadow –

were they mad?

Had nobody told them that their job was pointless

that the meadow was endless?

At least with McCabe's work I can feel excluded from it because of my ignorance. In the case of Tom Pow, I confess I just feel excluded. How does he manage to spin such a deal of matter from what looks to one reader like nothing much at all? His In the Becoming: New and Selected Poems (Polygon, 12.99) no doubt has its moments of vision, but you will have to be prepared to search very hard for them through 260 pages of workaday free verse. Here is the beginning of the first piece in the book, Invitation :

Step through

the ragged hawthorn

into the park:

by a frozen pond

a muffled toddler

has absconded ...

Of course I am glad that the pond is frozen, as it means the muffled absconded toddler will not be able to fall into it and drown, but otherwise I find this distinctly uninviting. If not discouraged by Pow's arhythmical banality, you may be able to find more here than I could. The jacket proclaims him as "one of the finest poets of his generation" after all. I note references to such as Foucault and Freud and Kafka, not to speak of a poem derived from the letters of Elizabeth Bishop. But there is less to all this, I think, than meets the eye.

Roddy Lumsden's Third Wish Wasted (Bloodaxe Books, 7.95) is at least wittier and livelier, not to say some 200 pages shorter. Lumsden is not without prosodical skill either, as these iambics from his Between the Penny Dropping and the Penny Landing may make clear:

The things we want most we will never have.

We learned this when we overheard the song

of a slant moon which wraps the land below,

which courts significance in every corner,

spreads the blueshift, ekes the silver rose ...

Lovely jubbly, Tennysonian even, but (pardon me and the Oxford English Dictionary ) what exactly is a blueshift? And doesn't that "slant moon" belong to Hart Crane's famous Praise for an Urn? And can even the song of Hart Crane's slant moon be said to eke the silver rose, rather than eke out the poor thing?

I don't know. I confess my bafflement. This is where we came in, save that I've just remembered the name of that story by Malcolm Lowry. It is called Through the Panama , all about a drunk (of course) going on a tramp-ship through the Panama Canal, and the things that flow through the drunk's head in time to the rhythm of the ship's ancient engine. Wonderful stuff. More truly poetic, in fact, than any of the books I've just reviewed here, with the possible exception of the Burnside.

&149 John Burnside is at the Edinburgh book festival tomorrow afternoon; Brian McCabe on Sunday 30 August.