Caal Cries by Alistair Lawrie

Drunk Muse Press (2023) £8.50

A Review by James Robertson

After a lifetime of teaching, encouraging others to read poetry and to write it, Peterhead-born, Stonehaven-settled Alistair Lawrie finally sets out his own stall with this, his first collection. And was it worth the wait? To borrow the last line from Mysie, ‘Aye, loon, you took your time … at last.’

‘Words are what we do,’ Lawrie declares in a brief introduction, and he himself does them with passion, wit and craft. There are thirty-eight poems gathered here, the majority in his native Doric, but the shift is smooth between those and the English ones, so strong is the vocal propulsion that drives each poem forward. Take the opening lines of that poem Mysie, which, because of its dramatic flow, you hardly notice is in strict iambic pentameters:

‘I mind the times I stood ootside her hoos,
my hands cupped roon a steamin bowl o broth
my granny made for her. ‘Tell her it’s gaan
tae waste or ens she’ll nivver tak it.’ Yet
again a bairnlike sense o daein richt
impelled me past the peelin pent that swaalt
an burst disease like on her door. The stink
inside o sweat an pish an foost wid catch
my breath; my hand wid shak a bittie files
as I peered roon the mirk inside tae see
far she cwid be.’

‘I mind the times…’The memories unfold in hurried sentences just like those the anxious, feart loon himself might have used. Poems such as Generations and Tales of a Grandfather also look back to older folk with the same mix of wonder and grounded realism:

‘An aal een an a younger, heids thegither,
yarnin lachin lang syne in their een,
the shadda o mortality hingin owre wis aa
is keepit back a whilie mair by siclike dreams.’

Humour lightens the load considerably. There is biting satire in Twa Newsmen, which parodies the ballad The Twa Corbies, and Dicht yer ain door steen is a droll reflection on the tensions between speaking Doric and ‘spikkin proper’ (sometimes recommended by mothers for social advancement):

‘I elongated aa ma vowels
Till that it soonded like ma bowels
Were comin through ma mooth;
Aa full o diphthongs  broke in twa,
It wid be sure tae please ma ma;
I’d soon like folk doon sooth.’

In longer pieces Lawrie really puts his native tongue to work. A Glenbervie Laird Orders his Memorial is the kind of monologue Robert Browning might have written had he had the Doric. Elsewhere older writers like Robert Henryson and Homer, whose contemporary relevance Lawrie clearly does not doubt, are referenced. Sad Captains: Boys to Men is a brutal, Iliad-influenced take on the passing of rites of male violence from one generation to the next, while Mithers captures the age-old maternal worry for the son no longer a bairn:

‘She winners fit he does the nicht
across the warld, aa owre;
is’t drink or drugs or some bit lass
keeps him ootowre her door?’

In short, Caal Cries is a collection of linguistic brilliance and emotional depth which I expect to draw me back again and again.