Four Reviews

A Review by Richie McCaffery

Louise Peterkin, The Night Jar (Salt Publishing, 2020), £9.99
Rob A. Mackenzie, The Book of Revelation (Salt Publishing, 2020), £9.99
Ken Cockburn, ed., Hunger Like Starlings (Tapsalteerie, 2020), £5
W. N. Herbert, The Wreck of the Fathership (Bloodaxe Books, 2020), £12.99

Although we live in virulent times and face multiple crises of an epidemiological, environmental and political nature, at least poetry appears to be in rude health.

Louise Peterkin’s The Night Jar contains poems that are incantatory and dream-like but always bordering on nightmares. In ‘Perfume’ two children decide to make their own fragrance with whatever they can find. What follows is rather like Heaney’s ‘Death of a Naturalist’ in terms of the loss of innocence and encroaching horror, that the beautiful fuchsias picked for the scent end up as festering sludge. Unlike Heaney, who ends his poem with an image of almost paralysed fright, Peterkin pushes it further, her speakers revel in the abject:

When it was ready
we opened the lid to a tomb,

black sludge edging the inside:
a necromantic border.

We hid our horror at the slime,
baptised the fetid pong, “Parisienne”

and in emptied shampoo bottles
labelled over with a flouncy script

distilled the sullied water
for our mothers.

What is most striking about Peterkin’s approach is that often she draws her cues for poems from popular culture or fairy tales. This is nothing new, but most poets are praised for seeing the extraordinary in the quotidian (vide Larkin). Peterkin inverts this, she sees the mundanity in the fantasy, often to great comic effect. Take, for instance, ‘Jaws’ a poem about one of James Bond’s more terrifying foes. The poem recounts all his bloody exploits in vivid similes (one of Peterkin’s main strengths) and ends with an image of a disillusioned company man:

[…] In the end, I doubt
I am so very different from others – always
someone else giving the orders, always
the taste of blood in my mouth.

Rob A. Mackenzie’s The Book of Revelation seems like much more of a symptomatic text of our times than Peterkin’s. Biting, satirical, polemical and eschatological, this collection is Mackenzie’s attempt to navigate the outrageous labyrinth of the 2010s. Many of the poems talk shop about the poetry world and cock a snook at its self-serving and navel-gazing irrelevance, as in ‘Chapter 3’:

I should have prayed for a Creative Scotland grant
to write in situ, perched on Patmos rock and recording
local detail at taxpayers’ expense: how other poets –
the true professionals – wangle a holiday from doing

nothing at all except scribbling in sand, what I do when
neither working nor plagiarising.

The supineness of Auden’s claim that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ is enough to fire poets up to prove him wrong, but in this collection Mackenzie asks a serious question – what use is poetry in the midst of apocalypse, how can poets do anything meaningful when they are torn between back-scratching and back-biting? To quote from ‘Atmospheric’: ‘there will always / be work for hairdressers during a war’. As a Church of Scotland minister, Mackenzie knows that portentous sermonising is not the best way of getting the message across. Instead he makes acute remarks about our condition via humour. Here is a glimpse into ‘The Future’:

[…] If poets
were paid according to what they’re worth, the literary
economy would flatline, leaving arts cash to manufacture
the four nuclear submarines politicians keep promising,
a writer-in-residence for each. Doncha see the future
brightening like a golden sunset? The future is in capable
hands, between tweets.

It remains to be seen how well Mackenzie’s poems will date, imbued as they are with so many specific cultural references, brands and trademarks, but on the basis of the grim forecast for our future in these poems, that might not matter.

Hunger Like Starlings is the fruits of a 2019 translation workshop funded by the Edwin Morgan Trust which teamed up three Scottish and three Hungarian poets. Morgan himself had a great proclivity for translating Hungarian poetry. Ken Cockburn’s introduction raises some important points, how the tenor and register of Hungarian and Scottish poetry differs – the former more ‘depressive’ and conversational, the latter ‘expressive’ and performative. What follows, however, is a laudable cross-cultural exchange of practices, perspectives and poems. I was particularly struck by Mónika Ferencz’s ‘Cementgyár ősszel’ as translated by Em Strang as ‘Cement factory in autumn’:

The sound of Death could not be heard,
drumming his eight legs in the guts of the man.
I began hitting the cold concrete wall
to the faint rhythm of the sound coming through
and realised that it, too, is only cement
and water; that what is made from dust
will eventually once again become dust.
I kept hitting the concrete wall,
and realised my fist was made of porcelain.

W. N. Herbert’s new collection is called The Wreck of the Fathership and it’s a dreadnought of a book, well over 200 pages long. Readers might wonder why Herbert chose ‘fathership’ rather than ‘mothership’ and this is quickly explained with the dedication to his late father. The first couple of sections of the book are distinctly elegiac and local to Dundee, mourning and remembering the poet’s father, one section is even called ‘Algos’ (Greek for pain). Although Herbert is praised for his linguistic elan and brio, code-switching between registers and dialects in his often ludic poetry, many of these poems are starkly poignant:

I remember the nurse saying ‘Goodbye’
to my father’s dead body as I left, having
attempted a kiss which felt too formal,
as though I were being introduced to
this foreign ambassador, his corpse.
from ‘XVII’ in ‘The Wreck of the Fathership’

These ruminations on fatherhood begin to take on a more universal significance as the book gets towards the midway point of its voyage. The weather – political and climatological – becomes distinctly more tempestuous and readers are warned repeatedly about the ‘ninth wave’, the wave that could capsize everything and drown them like the ill-starred crew of the lifeboat Mona in Dundee in 1959. Nature might have always been seen as essentially maternal but it’s the patriarchy across the world that seems to be locked in a maelstrom of self-destruction:

The Faithership, the Faithership!
Wha sall loosen its deid man’s grip?
Auld Man o the Sea, Youth’s scorpion ride
He’ll no let gae till the Yirth huz died.
from ‘The Fathership’

In the latter stages of the book, faced with the most pressing issues of our times, Herbert begins to get his old verbal dynamism back, not to mention his wit. There are puns and parodies galore, including the resurrection of ‘Oor Wullie McFrankengonagall’ with ‘a hunnert and fufty thoosan volts’. The richness and multiplicity of this book can only be saluted. Hugh MacDiarmid once archly described his writing in synthetic Scots and English as ‘Ecclefechan gongorism’ and I’d like to think that here Herbert channels his Dundonian duende, and it’s this playfulness and linguistic vigour that is ultimately redemptive.