These days all is war and war’s alarums. The antidote is care. Alan Riach introduces a few more poets whose work is not on publicity’s agenda...

WE ended last week with John Purser’s poem “A Storm of Decency” from his new collection, This Much Endures (Kennedy & Boyd, 2021) and we’ll come back to that book and a very different poem at the end of today’s essay. But I’d like to start with George Gunn, whose Chronicles of the First Light (Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire: Drunk Muse Press, 2021) is similarly a “small press” publication, the sort of book you need to know to look for.

Even books of poems have their market context. The American critic Guy Davenport in an essay “Do You Have a Poem Book on EE Cummings”, from his collection The Geography of the Imagination (1981), points out that even readers familiar with the poetry “names” (he mentions Robert Lowell) are unlikely to have been told about poets like Jonathan Williams or JV Cunningham, “whose poems are as well made as wristwatches”.

The scope for education is large: “Journalism, the purpose of which is to inform and to disseminate, isn’t doing its job; neither are the schools. Thirty years of liberal twiddling with the lines of communication has made it almost impossible to broadcast anything but received propaganda.”

The National:

George Gunn’s Chronicles of the First Light begins with Eclogues and Elegies

News of warfare in mass media hardly ever informs accurately and sensitively and almost never disseminates reliable understanding of all the considerations involved. The reasons for this are well known. What’s the antidote?

Davenport concludes: “All the arts are in the same predicament, so that what’s happening in the minds that keep other minds alive and give them the courage to live is reported, if at all, in a dangerously denatured and official trickle of news. The arts can look after themselves; they are used to neglect and obfuscation. It is the people who suffer from the dullness and ignorance of the press.”

So, here’s news of a different kind. George Gunn’s Chronicles of the First Light begins with Eclogues and Elegies. “Eclogue” just means a short poem usually in a pastoral or non-urban location. Gunn’s territory is Caithness.

The poems in the first section of his book name particular places as points of residence and departure for the meditations and pronouncements they prompt: Duncansby Head, Wick, Skirza, Dunbeath.

The “Elegies” include “Dùthchas: A Prayer”, which transcends the specificity of location to offer a secular yet reverent hope in a ritual of passage: “I knew a woman once” it begins, and then describes her speaking of her native island, and how, each night before sleep she recited the place names all along its length and back again, so that in the morning the scent of its heather would be in her nostrils. Land, people, culture: the tripartite meaning of interconnection the word “dùthchas” signifies is memorable, personal and palpable. Making it work is war’s antidote.

“Dunnet Ode” is a moving elegy for Paddy Bort (1954-2017), the writer, singer, scholar and folk music activist Lesley Riddoch described as “an all-round European at a time when that has never been more vitally needed”. Gunn’s farewell is a salutation of the everyday and the exceptional made one:

even the quarter bottle of Bells
I got from the Thurso Co-op
to salute your majestic beard
your easy kindness
your democratic energy
sweet it tastes among the ancient dead
in Dunnet kirkyard where I toast you
taking a sacrilegious swig
trying with my own people all around me
to bless you somehow in good company

In “The Plague Ghosts of Atomic City” the increasingly defunct lastingly poisonous inimical nuclear machinery at Dounreay spreads its legacy as the ghosts “walk invisible & terrible / through the temporary streets” and all the while, “the great wheel turns”.

One of Gunn’s distinctions is that although his familiar landscapes and histories are deep in his writing, he is not limited by them. In “A Very Long Winter” he presents an elegy for Tom Leonard (1944-2018) connecting the “Norse & Gaelic landscape” with the “stone fields of the people” inhabited by Leonard in Glasgow as much as anyone anywhere. The strength of the imagery supplies the force of human judgement: “Morality is the product of power / the blood strawberry clouds over Hoy”.

The closing poems bring us into recent times. In “Lockdown”, “The wild geese continue to leave / as if they know the Pest is rife”. We see “the old left to die in care-homes” and “the rich protecting their booty”. It’s nature, as well as the poet, delivering the verdict: as “The selfish skulk out of the supermarket / laden down with flour pasta rice” there is the encompassing context: “the silver silence of the Voar”.

Gunn has a portfolio of plays, a major novel, The Great Edge (2017), a wonderfully idiosyncratic “guide” to Caithness, The Province of the Cat (2015) and ongoing monthly essays on the website Bella Caledonia, always worth reading. His poetry arises from deep conviction, a lifetime’s experience of the north-east of Scotland and of the exploitative priorities of the nuclear industry right there on his doorstep, horrifically close.

I’ve written about his work before in The National, on February 4, 2019 (click here to read that).

In Chronicles of the First Light, the battle continues. The spirit knows no compromise.

Meanwhile, Hugh McMillan, in his two new collections Whit If? and Haphazardly in the Starless Night (both Luath Press, 2021) presents us respectively with zany speculative short poems on Scotland’s history as it might have been and a hefty collection of meditations on life through the pandemic and beyond.

The poems of Whit If? Are unreservedly impudent. Running through the national chronology, a few titles give you a sense of what’s going on: “Whit if Britain wis the richt wae roond?” (the BBC weather map is appropriately reversed, correcting that organisation’s infamous institutional bias).

“Whit if Alexander III haed Twitter?” (a different national history prevails when technology travels in time). “Whit if John Knox hid fawen in luve wi Mary Queen o Scots?” What, indeed. “Whit if Rabbie Burns hid a mobil?” (We would know about the pubs with no signal: Poosie Nancy’s, The Bush, Jarr’s Midden, The Sowsie Minge, The Mount, The Randie Gadger, and The Lang Wak Hame.) “Whit if we mindit the Alamo?” “Whit if Jacques Brel hid jynt the Corries?” And so forth.

Haphazardly, the Starless Night takes a more sober tone and more sobering perspective. These are wry, comic, poignant, salutary poems of the observant eye and the witnessing mind, sharp, curious and patient.

Returning finally to John Purser’s collection This Much Endures, here’s another kind of poem doing what only poems can do, prompting understanding, eliciting sympathy, strengthening resolve. In a world so given to venality and war, no further comment is required. Just read it.

MACCOWAN

It was a brutal night, an east wind cutting through the trees,

hail tearing the grass. All through the dark

you struggled to give birth, your muscles chilled

your calf reluctant to be born.

But we knew none of this, only you had not come

for hay at the first light. We found you down the hill,

standing beside your male calf lying limp on cold wet ground,

and you, unable to arouse him, no longer knowing what to do,

what could be done, experienced as you were.

I held the calf standing but he could not suck

and fell without my help to hold him up.

An hour to the surgery and back to fetch volostrum

and then I and my good neighbour, Katie,

pushed down the hill into the wind, and there you were

still standing, waiting, instinct alone holding you faithfully

to the bundle of wet bedraggled hide that lay

unmoving, waiting for its death.

And so we lifted him. I gripped his shoulders with my knees,

and held his muzzle high and pulled his cold-clenched teeth

open – but still he could not drink, not even when my neighbour

placed the teat between his lips to touch his tongue.

My head was bent touching his head; Katie bent too

as she dribbled the bottled milk into his mouth –

but even swallowing was beyond him, so weak he was with cold

and starved of oxygen from that long birth.

That’s when you joined us, your rough tongue

licking the spilt volostrum from his cheek

while Katie massaged your calf’s cold throat;

and, with our four heads, each touching each,

the cow, the calf, my neighbour and myself

became one thing, one life, determined.

Your long shapely horns never touched us;

only your coarse hair and the soft hair of the calf,

Katie’s dark hair and my own. That’s how it was.

That calf survived, as did you, dearest of all our cows;

patient and good; wise in your ways; a gentle leader, loyal.

Came the day when our dear Government decreed

that since you had been born before the outbreak of the BSE -

enabled by their own decisions - you must be slaughtered

and buried according to their book.

And so we took you to the Portree pens, my last sight of you

in the corner of a pen where you stood bewildered,

at a total loss, not knowing any longer where you were

or why I left you there. Your eyes haunt me.

I cannot cure this. I cannot make it good.

All I can offer to your memory,

this silly penance

in a poem.