Review
A Review by Ian Stephen
The 4000 nights of New York in 1988
Peter Urpeth
Peter Urpeth (2022) £4.99 Kindle
Summer / Break
Richie McCaffery,
Shoestring Press (2022) £10
(see also Passport, Richie McCaffery, Nine Arches Press (2018)
Let’s do the disclaimer first. One of these poets lives in the same village as me and we’ve worked together a few times when he has had his musician’s hat on. The other has reviewed one of my books and I’ve also reviewed a previous one of his. On the other hand I’ve also shared a poetry reading with Andrew Greig, whose novel I reviewed last year and I’ve just reviewed Graeme Macrae Burnett’s novel when he reviewed mine a few years back. But, as a poet too, I’m all too aware how few accessible forums are available for review and discussion of poetry. I look back to half-page reviews of new collections in The Scotsman or The Herald and know that this is not going to happen these days. Northwords Now has consistently made an effort to cover a range of work, in decent depth. That’s it, no vested interests and the editor says it’s inevitable in a small country. Right, these books are both powerful, manifest drive and mastery of craft, expressed in very appropriate physical form, and they couldn’t be much more different.
Moody Soho streetscape (Stephen Salmieri photograph) but matt not gloss, on the cover of Peter Urpeth’s collection, has the intervention of a typewriter-like script to suggest that this could be a howl of beat into punk into contemporary slam. We shuttle from London to New York in a microphoned burst of rhythm, arythm, scattered and disrupted rhyme, chime, repetition and stark plain short runs for breathers. But it’s not all like that. A second section, ‘Mouth-music’ is mainly rural in subject and imagery. Most of these poems are short and many take a bird or other point of focus in the natural word as a main subject. But you can’t assume that the urban riffs are all in one style and the rural ones in another.
‘The ash leaves are yellowing
on Morton Street
just now,
and the walk ups,
to the brownstone homes,
in unison with the fall,
pull back a yard it seems
to let the canopy
of light turn grey…’
The title poem of the second section beats with affirmation expressed in lyric. If like me you’ve been arrested by the rhythms of Louis MacNeice’s Bagpipe Music but pissed off by the
aloof and shallow content you will savour the language and shamanism of a poet who has invested in the culture he is embracing. Celebration soars in the city poems too. The poet glimpses the Goddess of memory, mother of the nine muses, after walking Brooklyn bridge, passing by the stoker of an oilcan broiler. Urpeth’s Irish family background might have something to do with his openness to epiphany, as when the plover flies. His celebration of kite and dunlin but especially plover evokes, for me, Alexander Hutchison’s Gavia Stellata, surely one of the great modern Scottish poems.
The most spare delineation of two figures, a wood and linocut by Willie Rodger, announces Summer/Break by Richie McCaffery. Shoestring Press have published Angus Martin as well as Tasmanian comparer of islands worldwide, Pete Hay. McCaffrey’s work is easy in that good company. In form, the book is necessary and sufficient – appropriate and well engineered but without distractions. That’s perfect for a poet who is a master of holding back as well as knowing when to let loose that arresting word or turn of phrase or insight which stops you in your tracks. As in Urpeth you can’t get lulled, but the way of achieving that is very different.
First, I sourced and read Passport, his 2018 collection with Nine Arches Press, as I mainly know the work from individual poems in journals like NWN and from First Hare, his fine pamphlet with Mariscat. There is a consistency of theme and style that verges on the daring. In contrast to Urpeth finding strange familiarity in new territory (Highlands and Islands) McCaffrey is disorientated by his move to Belgium. He turns that to powerful effect, delivered in mainly flat tones as when he describes his work amongst newspaper archives:
‘At the end of the day my fingers
are black like I’m a mechanic of words
tinkering with something I can’t fix.’
Just when you’re thinking you might be drawn down by the angst there’s an insight that is affirmative. Because it arises from such a carefully composed inner and outer landscape of dark it rings true:
‘but it takes a dirty little dinghy
to reach the best yachts in the harbour.’
That’s enough from the book I’m not reviewing but you might want to get it as well as ‘Summer/Break.’ The new book begins with a love lyric but one of parting in a tone as genuinely sad as the words of so many Gaelic airs. That key is pretty consistent though the sheer inventiveness of jumps of comparison keep you held by your lapels. He is closer to Marvel than Donne but very much a metaphysical.
Vibrant tracings of family, schooling, mentors and makers gone by, are strong as in the woodcuts of an expert printer. But myths are scrutinised. The millstone against the wall of a family house is in fact the wheel from a tool-grinder. Spelk survives in Northumbrian English but is, it seems, from Old English. It is the splinter, the Scots ‘skelf’, that might lodge in your hand even by a kist with perfect dovetails. Of course, a kist can be a coffin too as well as the seaman’s container for small possessions or the apprentice’s means of holding the tools he will need for life. The word is a title because in McCaffrey-the-maker’s art, one potent word on a deliberately plain board can take you along. The way back to survival, from being down, always seems to be in a return to fellowship, as when a nephew leads the speaker back to his mother.
A staghorn-handled fork, Georgian, is used to rake out a gutter but such introspection is always ready to jump out to achieve a wider range. That span is often the depth of time – acute awareness of past lives – and the way to that solidarity is precise language. During lockdown, like many of us, this poet got into gardening. This brings the word ‘deracinated’ and once again we have taken a joint leap from the dreich.