minimalist tendencies

A Review by Ian Stephen

12 Airs
Gerry Loose
Dockyard Press (2023) £6

The Ways of Salt
Angus Macmillan
Drunk Muse Press (2024) £10

Play my game
Alec Finlay
stewed rhubarb press (2023) £10

no: poems of urban zen
greum maol
Dockyard Press (2023) £8

from outside into the cave
daishin stephenson
Dockyard Press (2019) £6.99

Three of these books of poems are from the same publisher – Glasgow’s new ‘Dockyard Press’ and two are from other Scottish presses which already have a name for getting poems out to their audience. Angus Macmillan’s The Ways of Salt (from the robust Drunk Muse Press, also producers of the soon-to-be-revived ‘Poets Republic’ periodical) and Alec Finlay’s play my game (from stewed rhubarb press, overlapping with the Tapsalteerie imprint via Duncan Lockerbie) are both full-length collections at 70 to 90 pages. ‘from outside into the cave’ by daishin stephenson is 60 spare and spaced-out pages while the booklets by greum maol and gerry loose are small, notebook-style, sans serif, stapled and seem bare naked.
Let’s get the disclaimer out of the way. I’ve a connection with three out of the five poets and two out of the three publishers. That’s probably about the norm on the Scottish poetry scene but Alec Finlay was my main publisher for several years and Gerry Loose was a friend, though I didn’t see enough of him. Gerry’s sudden death earlier this year make this additional publication even more special.
Like Alec Finlay, much of Gerry’s work with language was expressed outside pages. There could be interventions in gardens or inscriptions where the context and other visual elements worked in partnership with language. Gerry’s Printed on Water was a new and selected poems from Shearsman in 2007.  Shearsman, who I thought published only poetry, also published his very fine prose stemming from a residency in Ardnamurchan and Vagabond Voices made a rare departure into poetry to publish not one but two Loose poetry collections (2014 and 2018). His work doesn’t easily fit categories but it does seem to find its own simple and just-right form. Twelve Airs is an exquisite but unfussy example. The stapled centrefold is blank. This separates two complementary expressions written twenty years apart.
Further breathing space is provided by a blank left page beside each spare right one. Here is the content of one page in full:
    hinds on the path
       / no hinds on the path
    sense of presence
    sense of absence
    knowledge of hind space
    bracken moving

You have to slow down and try to be still as if not to disturb fellow creatures. As the title suggests this is more music than verse. A subtle chiming of language is born from years of play.
Angus Macmillan has music in his life too. He was a founder member of The Lochies folk group who helped bring some of Murdo Macfarlane’s moving lyrics out to the world. He also has Gaelic song in his genetic make-up and the varied percussive roll of The  Minch sounding through formative years. This gathering of many years of widely published poems alternates between pared- down forms such as haiku-like lines in Gaelic to longer lyrical lines which acknowledge Murdo and the trilingual William Neil. Though Macmillan’s range is that of a spring tide there are consistent concerns which bring cohesion out of the rich variety.
This is a psychologist both at work and play. Perhaps that explains such empathy with fox and owl and sanderling. He needs to let his steps take him beyond human maps:
    ‘I tried to recall guides for the lost -
    Angles of light, the greening of moss’

If this sounds heavy-going, it isn’t because there is orchestration and balance in the grouping of poems. Wit and wordplay leaven his natural thoughtfulness.
The act of playing contributes title, cover imagery and a hop skip and jump into the refined but plain production of Alec Finlay’s poems. Many collaborative and cross-art projects are referenced but these are words only, apart from three very simple drawings of hands on the cover. And yet the layers are often present. Sometimes this is overt, as in an opening nod to Celan, Creeley or Sappho. More often there is an unstated or hinted suggestion of allusion. For me Finlay’s intervention of substituting flags with wind-blown clouds (as in Basho) for the partisan flags flown by two sides of Derry is a seminal work for those who are familiar with some of what has gone before. Here, there may be an over-the-shoulder glance back to haibun. I’d say a reader will be aware they are moving in an alternative current of poetry, perhaps ‘minimalist’ at times or ‘experimental’ rather than seeking to make something fresh between more conventionally formal structures. We are closer to Thomas A Clark and Gael Turnbull than we are to long-established forms. Yet forms there are. Once more it is the alchemy of placing language and thought together which results in the memorable. And once more the natural world is more subject than background:
    ‘what’s a river?
    a flower with its roots in the hills’

And amongst a series of couplets stating the not-so-obvious:
    ‘a wave can’t reach any shore
    but the one it faces’
    
The form as well as the title of no: poems of urban zen suggests that there are Buddhists at work - or play. The publishers’ website says:
    ‘Dockyard is a micropress run by two Zen Buddhist monks in Glasgow. Married to each other, we live in the Wyndford housing scheme in Maryhill, in a hermitage we call ‘Comraich airson Lusan Leònte/Wounded Plant Sanctuary.’ Modesty of presentation blurs any distinction between what is a little book and what is large in scale. All three ‘dockyard’ publications have discovered a form suited to the content. greum maol stops at two lines when that’s enough or makes a formal haiku when it seems natural. Animals and plants are studied in this urban landscape but human lives are a main subject:
    ‘he finds the half and half, selects two cartons,
    stands in line at the checkout. light of dead
    stars, her asleep now in their home. coffee
    she will drink when she wakes. a journey

    of two blocks in the universe.’

daishin stephenson also paints and takes photographs. Her considered monochrome sweeps are also a way in to observations. These alternate between nature and the human. There are many three-line poems but no attempt to use the formal measures of haiku. Poems which focus on kindness and clear sight in the everyday clutter moved me most:
    ‘woman stands in rain
    toothless, wearing one shoe
    fixes her hair in window’s reflection’