Book review: Beyond, by Aonghas MacNeacail

This posthumous collection shows Aonghas MacNeacail to be a fine poet of nature and the seasons, writes Susan Mansfield

Although he was best known as a Gaelic poet, Aonghas MacNeacail resisted being pigeon-holed as such. He hoped this collection, bringing together the poems written since his last book of poetry in English, 1990’s Rock and Water, would redress that balance.

Colin Bramwell, who had begun to work with him on it before MacNeacail’s death, completed the book with the help of his wife, the poet Gerda Stevenson. With Alasdair Gray’s 1973 portrait on the cover, Gray’s marginalia on the back and MacNeacail’s own handwritten poem from the time on the inside cover, it is a posthumous tribute to his polyglot skill.

Many of the early poems reflect on his childhood, but with anger as well as warmth, for school was a harsh place, in the grip of a dour Presbyterianism, where the language of his place and people was disallowed. It was only while writer-in-residence at Sabhal Mor Ostaig in 1977 that he fully embraced writing poetry in Gaelic.

Aonghas MacNeacail

The poems make use of a range of forms, often favouring a short line. MacNeacail is adept at line breaks and punctuates minimally: there are very few full stops. Some of the poems are striking in their brevity, encapsulating observations, like “A Serious Matter” and “Two Crows”. In others, like “Edited Epics” and “The Notebook”, the powerful final poem, he wraps big ideas in the briefest, most delicate of stanzas.

He is a fine poet of nature and the seasons, not afraid to praise the “sheer inexhaustible beauty” of a snow-covered landscape in “Snowhere”, and observing creatures with a wry wit reminiscent of Norman MacCaig in poems like “From A Shoreline in Skye”, in which the heron “with its own reflection [makes] a pair of clapping hands [to] applaud its own existence”.

Like MacCaig, he is strong on observation, whether he is gazing at an autumn leaf or a pair of lovers in the cafe at Kelvingrove Museum. He switches tones nimbly and enjoys sound: “Keranterec Dusk” is a playful sound poem about the song of the cricket.

Complex subjects are handled with delicacy, but always reach towards clarity. “When Bill Dunn Swam the Corrievreckan” is defiant, the swimmer using his skills and his knowledge of the sea to kick against “the humdrum inevitability of death”.

The influence of American poets becomes most evident in “American Sequence”, a record of a transatlantic trip. As MacNeacail haunts the haunts of the poet Robert Creeley, the poem becomes an easy, conversational flow of observation, ideas and snatches of speech. The fourth part of the sequence, “Coyote Plays with Custer’s Ghost”, is in the richly imagined voice of a native Gael who is living among the First Nation people of America.

MacNeacail was both a Gael and a citizen of the world, and he brings all this knowledge to bear on his reflections about Scotland. “This Land is Your Land – A picaresque pibroch”, is one of the longest poems in the book, a multi-textured, clear-eyed look at a country troubled by both harsh religion and duplicitous neighbours:

“my country is a marriage bed/ in which raw hopes and bleak/ despairs reach out to consummate/ unseasonable waspish unions,/ where binding oil with water, sand/ with air, is easier than coupling/ politics with truth…”

Beyond by Aonghas MacNeacail, Shearsman Books, £12.95