The Day Before & The Island in the Sound

A Review by Mandy Haggith

The Day Before
Aoife Lyall
Bloodaxe Books (2024) £12.00

The Island in the Sound
Niall Campbell
Bloodaxe Books (2024) £12.00

These poets have three things in common. They both hail from the west and have made their homes on the east side of Scotland; Niall Campbell is from South Uist and is now in Fife while Aoife Lyall hails from Ireland and lives in Inverness. They are both in their late thirties and are ten years married. And they are both parents to small children. Yet they handle these three commonalities in their poetry in hugely different ways.

Both collections are dense with references to place. Aoife Lyall’s poems are firmly from her current abode with barely a reference to Ireland, featuring locations that feature in everyday life, like supermarkets and suburban housing. The Day Before concludes with a sequence of poems about the Southern Distributor Road around Inverness. A less promising space for poetry could hardly be imagined and they show us seven pieces of urban detritus and traffic carnage: a mirror off a car, a shopping trolley, an uprooted dandelion and a badger, pigeon and hedgehog, all dead, yet between which life is woven and honoured as they are compared to museum pieces, personified, played with, listened to, made kin, grieved for, and mothered.

Niall Campbell, by contrast, sets many of his poems in the Hebrides, as suggested by the title The Island in the Sound, and Fife hardly gets a mention. There are several island sonnets, evoking Lingay, Fugay, Eriskay, Mingulay and St Kilda as well as South Uist, and the sea is a constant presence, Gaelic folklore and history loom large and where there is everyday life it tends to be that of islanders doing their jobs: fishermen at the pier, an apprentice processing crabs, a lighthouse keeper.

It is a nice coincidence that both poets note the tenth anniversary of their weddings. Aoife Lyall celebrates it with a poem, Wildflowers, that compares the flowers they have grown together to their children, marvelling at ‘the complexity of their form, at their ability to grow / and yet to know, to say they would not be here if not for us’. Niall Campbell’s decade is the inspiration for six Love letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage, interspersed among the collection, as if kept as bookmarks, and they mostly look back on the start of the relationship (‘do you remember how back we were at it, / being young, I mean’) when their love was something wild that he now feels “incapable of”, now that they are “away from the beginning”. Yet these are still deeply romantic poems.

As parents, the differences between the collections is most stark. Aoife Lyall’s a busy mother, handling the logistical difficulties of the pandemic, keeping children entertained (most clearly shown in The Train, which is a day-long game) and comforted in the early hours, frankly exposed in the sequence The Back of Five.  There are fewer poems in her collection and her children feature in many of them. Niall Campbell’s son is lovingly evoked, for example in A Car for Jacob, but his more prolific poetry perhaps reflects the different reality for fathers in our society, with his attention mostly free to be elsewhere, often back in time, relating tales of Fionn mac Chumhaill or conjuring the Harpy of Rubha Meall nan Caorach, ‘her grey wreath of hair, her sickle claws/ the tea map of her ancient skin’.

Very different they may be, but both poets draw their poetry from deep wells of love. Niall Campbell concludes: ‘this much I understand of things: / a great part will be revealed by watching / but the greater part will be revealed by love’. Aoife Lyall says: ‘Whatever you use this love for, use it. I am giving it to you.’ Both poets offer it to us with open-hearted generosity.