Poetry round-up: Colin Bramwell | Charles Lang | Andrés Ordorica | Erica McAlpine

Stuart Kelly reviews four recent poetry releases, starting with Colin Bramwell’s “trans-culturations” of the work of Fernando Pessoa

In melancholic moments I sometimes wonder if more people write poetry than actually read it. Given its niche nature I do not intend to get embroiled in fruitless debates about what is and isn’t poetry; what is and isn’t any good is far more important.

Colin Bramwell | Tod Richter

Colin Bramwell’s Fower Pessoas is a revelation, and shows just how strong Scots poetry can be. His afterword is the most cogent defence of Scots I have read in a while: “Scots is unstandardised, and so presents readers with a peculiarly inauthentic form of authenticity that varies from writer to writer”. It does so in bravura fashion here.

These are “trans-culturations” of Fernando Pessoa, shifting local references from Lisbon to Glasgow, much in the manner of Angus Calder’s Horace in Tollcross or James Robertson’s Baudelaire, Fae The Flouers O Evil. What is exceptional is that Bramwell fashions distinct, plural Scots for Pessoa’s different heteronyms; so the poems by “Alberto Caeiro” are in a different Scots to “Álvaro de Campos” (who supposedly studied engineering in Glasgow). The chutzpah is amazing: Pessoa’s Tobacconist not only becomes Newsagent, but the “chocolates” is “Thir isnae a mair metaphysical sweetie in the warld then the Freddo, lass!”

The Scots very effectively grounds the anti-metaphysics of the “Keeper of Sheep” poems: “The anely hidden meaning ae things, is things”; likewise the rather abstract “Indefinido” is alchemically turned into “Primordial Minestrone”.

This book impressed me so much I sought out Bramwell’s pamphlet, The Highland Citizenship Test, and the book is no fluke. “Palindromes for Young Divorcees” is one of the cleverest and most moving poems I have read in ages.

Charles Lang | Contributed

Charles Lang’s The Oasis is also in Scots, but it is a thinner affair, striving to flaunt the echt/kosher/dinkum Scots Bramwell eschews. Some of the poems might be better as little Des Dillon flash fictions, or Tom Leonard without the punchline.

There is an undertow of apathetic anomie. In “Sabbath” it’s “This day / - praise the Lord - / we’ll dae nothin”, later, we read “langwij is currency / n O I speak / only oan ma own behalf. / I huv nothin / n everythin tae say”. Perhaps the best iteration is “I remember wit it wis like / then it wisny. / Or it is.”

One poem, “A mess”, has the same text in three layouts, which only accentuates the paucity, and there is a kind of anti-art, prolier-than-thou chippiness in a friend being an “apprentice painter” which confuses “art school wannabes”. A sequence is called “Glasgow Sonnets” – they do have 14 lines, but anything that invites comparison with Edwin Morgan is likely to disappoint.

Andrés N Ordorica | Daniel McGowan

Andrés Ordorica also pays tribute to Morgan with an epigraph and referring to him as “a mentor I never met”. Morgan was interested in everything – few poets were as polymathic, generous and curious – and Ordorica seems in contrast singularly solipsistic.

One of the few flashes of wit in his collection Holy Boys is rhyming his name with “undress”. In another, the narrator is looking in a mirror at the hairdresser’s, noting his hair has a “thick / blackness the colour of petrol”. Unless he means Brent crude, the image is just wrong, but it he claims it has “the density of a slumbering panther”. Does a panther have more pounds per square foot than an ocelot or skunk? Does it matter? Furthermore, the panther is “in the shadow of its dreaming”, which is like poetry but meaningless.

The poem “Good Friday” has the narrator playing Jesus in a Passion Play. “Oh, how they crucified me, just like they did our Lord” (metaphorically, one presumes), but if the schoolboys “knew the truth of who I was…” (the narrator is referring to his sexuality), “they’d have crucified me a thousand times over”. This is not even blasphemous, which would imply some rigour, but pure narcissism.

There are lists, macaronics and repetitions which eke out the page count, and concrete pieces in dull imitation of Morgan’s “French Persian Cats Having A Ball”. Frequently it seemed the words could be replaced with little discernible difference: can you choose between “we bridge the chasm of ancestral trauma” and “we span the abyss of inherited aches?”

Erica McAlpine | Contributed

Finally, Erica McAlpine’s Small Pointed Things is a sheer delight. These are deft, intelligent and surprising poems, more traditional than Bramwell’s but equally shrewd. The rhymes fall naturally, even unobtrusively; and the endings have a falling note or sly reversal that seems like Louis MacNeice or Stevie Smith.

McAlpine uses the not-human as a pin to winkle out human psychologies. “Spider” is worth quoting to encapsulate the above: “She weaves and leaves it dangling, / whose home is neither made for long / nor wanting in its strength of spoke, / who cares for delicacy of stroke / but draws the singers from the song”.

These poems encompass both the uncanny (“The Hour of Long Shadows”, “Spirits”) and acute, astute observation – her animal poems are pleasingly wry. “Blackbirds” closes the collection, and it is a bravura piece: in a very tight space it crams colour difference, songs, gender dimorphism, tradition, and builds to a finale which almost sanctifies the ephemeral and mysterious. “Whose song / it was we would / never know, not having seen them / sing. But it would be wrong / to say, even if we could”. That is what true poetry can do.

Fower Pessoas by Colin Bramwell, Carcanet, £12.99; The Oasis by Charles Lang, Skein Press, £10; Holy Boys by Andrés Ordorica, £10.99; Small Pointed Things by Erica McAlpine, Carcanet, £11.99