POEMS and poetry are different things. Not everything that calls itself a “poem” has poetry in it. But good poems do. They are carefully made, which is why we have the term Scots Makar for the national poet of Scotland. But they can’t be manufactured, because to have poetry in them they have to be alive. If they’re not alive, they’re not poetry. And they’re not poems either. Alan Riach introduces a few poems you might not find elsewhere.

WE talked last week about the essay as a form in contrast to that of the poem: the former is exploration, the latter more closely focused. With such a generalisation, exceptions are innumerable but even so, good poems sharpen clarity and stay in the mind and mortal memory like nothing else. And they can help. Sometimes, when words seem almost impossible, inadequate and feeble, only a poem can work.

The application of a poem to experience lived, an image, a moment or a vision held in its words for the duration of what its language enacts, is the essence. Of course there are essays in verse and poems that wander.

Of course there are essays as tight as a lyric, sharp as the best panegyric. Exceptions emphasise a general truth but that truth isn’t always what you might expect. As the great American poet Edward Dorn says: “Poetry is where you find it, not where it says it’s at. Where it says it’s at, I don’t find a lot of poetry there – very often, mostly none.” Well, here are a few places where I’ve found it recently.

I mentioned last week Jim Stewart’s THIS: Tay Poems (Dundee: The Voyage Out Press, 2018), which has a foreword by Kirsty Gunn and an afterword, “About Jim Stewart” by Jane Goldman. It’s a collection that has little provenance in the “poetry book business”, which has its own priorities and agendas. And it’s hard to find. You might say, it’s obsolete. So many good things are, things that teach us forms of attention that are always helpful, good to be reminded by. Like the light from a kerosene lamp.

Stewart came from a Dundee working-class background and was variously employed as a sign writer, sales assistant, window cleaner, copy editor, proof-reader and journalist. He went to college, then Dundee University, later researching the work of Virginia Woolf at Edinburgh University.

He was a loved and inspirational teacher, a major force in developing creative writing at Dundee, writing poetry, publishing in little magazines. He died of cancer in 2016.

The book presents “an ecosystem fretted with the actions and habits of creatures and seasons that is both everyday and wondrous”. The poems “traverse the landscape around the Firth of Tay” conjuring in words “the minute whirling and turning of animal and human nature with its endlessly renewing mysteries and complications”. Try this, imagining a vole:

A hurry on the path
checks the dyke, the field.
The scurry stops when it squats to nip
a leaf, gripped in its frail claws.

Or this:

of swifts flying at high speed in the spring air as haar comes in from the sea: “Sick from the thrill of being / yanked along their shrieks, / swifts flung through the fog.”

Or this:

Two dead moles, bloody round the snouts,
baggy and infirm beside the road,
forepaws blessing left and right,
surprised for all time

Every now and then a book comes to your attention which you know should find a readership but will never be publicised or widely reviewed. Book buying habits nowadays are mainly either directed by what’s on the shelves of shops, which, unless they’re independent, are usually selected by commercial priorities, or by online searches that are predetermined by knowledge of what you’re looking for.

Here’s something else: Tigerish Waters: Selected Work by Sophie Reilly, edited by Samuel Reilly (Airdrie Print: Mad Weir Books, 2017). This book collects a short story in the form of a conversation with a taxi driver, a dialogue about writing, motivation and anxiety, a selection of poems, and journal entries from the last months of the author’s life.

Sophie Reilly was born in 1995, grew up in a Glasgow suburb, went to college in Dundee, gained a place to study at St Andrews, but took her own life on July 31, 2016. Her brother’s collection of her work here is uniquely valuable, opening a singular world of mind and writing in an extreme and ultimately disastrous vacillation between despair and affirmation.

Despite her battle with bipolar and emotionally unstable personality disorder, Reilly’s writing is a painful, but finally life-enhancing, record of desire.

“What she wanted, always, was to reach a point in life where her mind would relax its assault, open to the wide beauty of the human world around her, and let her at last position herself in its context.”

We can recognise that want, and sympathise. “But the final section of this volume, for all the flashes of huge and generous hope, is an account of such a mind gradually losing control.” Here’s her poem “Look Up”:

The sky groans with stars.
Webs of eccentricities
Yawning back through space and history.
Seductive velvet, punctured by life.
More and more, thick and fast;
My retinas sear with too much to bear
Of the truth, the concrete, the real.
I see my life mapped in erratic dots,
Memories burst from their sleep –
Sandy ice cream, playground fancies,
Burning nostrils and something strange
In the chest permeating
everything –
A sort of unspecified longing,
A wistfulness, a reaching out
For something to cling to
To melt my heart sculpted in ice.
Too much, too fast, remembrance stabs
My gut with realization –
I’m still a child, with sticky hands,
Screaming for salvation.

In “A Good Day” recollections of “Little things / Nuances of light and sweet air” are gulped in lungfuls, “with the luscious fervour / Of a silver-slip fish in a crystalline pool” and there’s an awakening, “to a dawn drenched in time” and a “the pouring return / Of myself.”

As her brother puts it in his restrained and moving introduction, these are the poems of “an extraordinary girl” for whom “the ordinary was always slipping beyond reach”.

With Sylvia Plath (the comparison cannot be shirked) there’s an inescapable premonition of her suicide but “Sophie’s is a different story – more likely, but less often told – of a talent defining itself in opposition to the mental anguish which caused the continual ebb of her ability to focus and thus, really, to live up to herself. Not world-weariness, but an inviolable faith in a world from which she felt herself cruelly excluded.”

In her note on “Mental Health Pride” from her final journal entries, Reilly says: “We are people, not diagnoses.” This is an intensely powerful book: singular, unique, slender, tough. Its potential is stopped exactly where it is, yet if the circumscription of mortality defines it, its virtue is literally inimitable. The generosity of compassion and the impatience of desire are soldered together in the sense the book delivers of the vulnerable intensity of hope.

Copies can be ordered at tigerishwaters.co.uk with profits going to the Scottish Association for Mental Health.