Meg Bateman / Allegory

Allegory

by Meg Bateman

On the single track roads in the Highlands
we seek each other’s eyes,
giving way to some,
beckoned through by others,
in a slow, supple dance.

But down goes my foot where the double track starts
as I swing away at twice – three times – the speed,
aware of nothing  but my own thoughts,
driving free, without hindrance.

Rarely need I pull in
for another to pass,
rarely does another wave back.

from Transparencies (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2013)

Meg Bateman’s first collection , Aotromachd /Lightness, made a stir when it was published in 1997. Here was a writer in Gaelic, not a native speaker (she  studied Gaelic at Aberdeen University and began to write her own poetry in that language), speaking of intimate subjects in a voice that was full of insecurity and yet boldly challenged the received view of Gaelic poetry – certainly as it was received by an English-speaking audience.

Anyone who has driven in the Highlands knows what Bateman, who lives on Skye, is describing in this poem, the decisions and the courtesies of negotiating a single-track road. But close communities, whether linguistic or physical,  are also confining: we can read the poem as an allegory of island life, even of Scottish life; of  choosing to write in Gaelic (for a community of less than 60,000 readers) or English.

Mostly self-translated, Bateman’s poetry  evokes both the timeless and the contemporary: love and disposable diapers. Carol Rumens has remarked: ‘The poems have the strength and simplicity of art made for a community rather than an elite, though they are far from artless.’

Robyn Marsack

BEST AMERICAN POETRY

John Burnside / From the Chinese

From the Chinese 

by John Burnside

Turn of the year

and a white Christmas turning to slush

on my neighbours’ fields

crows on the high road,

the yard streaked with coal dust

and gritting,

geraniums turning to mush

in the tubs and baskets.

I walk to the end of the road

to ease my sciatica:

ditch water, gorse bones; how did I get so cold

so quickly?

Thaw in the hedge

and the old gods return to the land

as buzzard and pink-footed goose and that

daylong, perpetual scrape

of winter forage;

but this is the time of year

when nothing to see

gives way to the hare in flight, the enormous

beauty of it stark against the mud

and thawglass on the track, before

it darts away, across the open fields

and leaves me dumbstruck, ready to be persuaded.

from Black Cat Bone (London: Cape Poetry, 2011)

John Burnside is a prolific writer: over a dozen collections of poems, half a dozen works of fiction, several memoirs… and the way they pour out is also typical of a single Burnside poem, which poet-critic Fiona Sampson has suggested ’resemble ragas more than traditional Western forms. Their organic shapes seem generated by their material, and by the running line of phrase leading to phrase…’. The poems have strong details yet blurred outlines: the country Burnside inhabits – his native Fife, the frozen north Europe he frequently explores – is often rain-swept, seen through mist, under cloud, under water.

In such landscapes, what is insubstantial becomes haunting, and unfinished stories, elusive memories, are revisited. There is an unhoused soul in this poetry, testing all sorts of boundaries. There are also birds, feral animals, and plant life: Burnside’s deep awareness of the natural world and human despoilation is key to his writing. In this poem, from a collection that won both the T.S. Eliot and the Forward prizes, there is just a hint at the end that he might believe in the possibility of the beautiful changes that spring could bring.

by Robyn Marsack

BEST AMERICAN POETRY

Portrait of the artist / Liz Lochhead / "Do better next time"

Portrait of the artist

Liz Lochhead

Poet 

'The Birmingham Post said they'd rather go to the dentist than sit through my first play again. I actually agreed with them'

Interview by Laura Barnett
Wednesday 21 August 2013 07.00 BST

When did you start writing poetry?

At art school in the late 1960s. When I was at school, and was supposed to be studying for my highers, I was always drawing. And then when I got to art school, and was supposed to be drawing, I started writing.

What was your big breakthrough?

A poetry event at Edinburgh University in 1972, called Poem 72: I was on as a support act to Norman MacCaig (1) and, as everybody was there to listen to him, they all heard me, too. One of them was Gordon Wright, who became my first publisher: a few months later, he got a small grant to put out my first collection, which sold 5,000 copies.

Did you always set out to perform your poems?

Yes – for me, writing poetry has always been about putting sounds down in black and white. I refuse to make a distinction between "page poetry" and "spoken-word poetry". If it's good spoken-word poetry, I want to read it on the page as well. And if it's a proper poem, it should be performable.

What does being the Scots Makar actually involve?

All kinds of things: writing poems for official occasions; doing a lot of readings. "Makar" just means "maker", and I like the title: it reflects the fact that just as you can make a good pot of soup, you can make a poem.

Do you see yourself as heir to a particularly Scottish oral tradition?

Not really. I grew up being taught Burns and the border ballads – but then John Keats grew up on those ballads as well (2). My sensibilities are fairly Scottish, but I'm also very keen on American poetry, and on the Liverpool poets Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough.

What drew you to playwriting?

Going along to the Citizens theatre (3)as a student in Glasgow. It was a very international, unparochial, European theatre – with very cheap tickets. I went a lot with my late husband (4).

Would independence be a good thing for the arts in Scotland?

We'll find out. A lot of artists I know are going to vote yes. I'm not so sure the union has benefited Scotland culturally: Irish playwriting, for instance, is taken more seriously than Scottish playwriting, because Ireland is an independent country. When my play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off was a hit in London (5), my agent sent it to the National Theatre. They said: "We love this piece, but it's far too Scottish for us."

What's the worst thing anyone ever said about you?

The Birmingham Post wrote of my first play, Blood and Ice, that they would rather go to the dentist than sit through it again (6). I actually agreed, but it made me think: "Do better next time."

Who or what have you sacrificed for your art?

Gosh, nothing: I've been very lucky. I've had a lot of attention I probably don't deserve.

In short

Born: Motherwell, 1947.

Career: Began performing poetry in the 1970s; was appointed the Scots Makar, or poet laureate, in 2011. Plays include Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, and Scots adaptations of Molière's Tartuffe and The Misanthrope. She performs her show Apple Says Aaah at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, until 25 August (edfringe.com).

High point: "The opening nights of Mary Queen of Scots, Perfect Days and Medea. They were all stormers."

Low point: "Working on the play Jock Tamson's Bairns. I found I didn't like improvised theatre."

Footnotes

(1) The late, Edinburgh-based poet and former primary school teacher.

(2) The ballads of Thomas Rhymer and Tam Lin are said to have been sources for Keats's poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

(3) Based in the Gorbals, the theatre has been a vital part of the UK theatre scenesince the 19th century, and once hosted a riot after an elephant panicked on stage.

(4) Architect Tom Logan, who died in 2010.

(5) Ran at the Donmar for a week in 1987.

(6) The play was directed by a young Michael Boyd, who has also recalled this review as a career low.

THE GUARDIAN

KISS

Portrait of the artist / Liz Lochhead / "Do better next time"

Portrait of the artist / John Cooper Clarke / At heart, I'm just a frustrated playboy

Portrait of the artist / Alice Oswald / 'As a child, I wrote in a little notebook I hid in a bush'
Portrait of the artist / Lemn Sissay / 'An artist doesn't need to suffer to create'

DRAGON

001 Portrait of the artist / Will Alsop / 'I've learned never to trust anyone with big feet and a small head'

Portrait of the artist / Jane Birkin / 'I was at the wrong audition, but Graham Greene still gave me my big break'

Portrait of the artist / Vanessa Paradis/ 'I was only a teenager when I started out in the music industry. I didn't look my best'

Portrait of the artist / Siri Hustvedt / 'I don't read reviews'

Portrait of the artist / Michael Rosen / 'Kids don't get the chance to enjoy poetry'

Portrait of the artist / Sebastião Salgado / 'I looked through a lens and ended up abandoning everything else'

Portrait of the artist / Kristin Scott Thomas / The English Patient or Four Weddings

Portrait of the artist / Margaret Drabble / "I think about Shakespeare every day"

Portrait of the artist / Cornelia Parker / "I didn't make any money out of my art until I was in my 40s"

Kathleen Jamie / Moon

Moon

by Kathleen Jamie

Last night, when the moon
slipped into my attic-room
as an oblong of light,
I sensed she’d come to commiserate.

It was August. She travelled
with a small valise
of darkness, and the first few stars
returning to the northern sky,

and my room, it seemed,
had missed her. She pretended
an interest in the bookcase
while other objects

stirred, as in a rockpool,
with unexpected life:
strings of beads in their green bowl gleamed,
the paper-crowded desk;

the books, too, appeared inclined
to open and confess.
Being sure the moon
harboured some intention,

I waited; watched for an age
her cool glaze shift
first toward a flower sketch
pinned on the far wall

then glide to recline
along the pinewood floor
before I’d had enough. Moon,
I said, we’re both scarred now.

Are they quite beyond you,the simple words of love? Say them.You are not my mother;with my mother, I waited unto death.

 from The Overhaul  (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2015)                                                                         

Kathleen Jamie’s The Overhaul, which won the Costa Prize for Poetry in 2012, has recently been published in the USA. These mid-life poems are deceptively simple, less ebullient than some of her earlier work – the feisty poems of The Queen of Sheba gave voice to a generation of Scottish women not prepared to be subdued; more conversational, full of questions. Thrifty with words when confronted by spendthrift nature, ‘Her poetry is to be admired as one might a winter garden for its outline, clarity and light’, wrote the Observer reviewer; ‘Reading the collection is, on one level, the equivalent of taking a Scottish walk, observing birds, deer, sheep and the sea.’

Jamie lives in Fife, and is Chair of the Creative Writing programme at the University of Stirling.Her fine essay collections, like her poetry, examine  with lyrical acuity the way humans dwell in, delight in and despoil the natural world. She is rarely as self-referential as in The Overhaul. The last lines of ‘Moon’ surprise us with their buried feeling brought to light, their deeply Presbyterian tone.

Robyn Marsack

BEST AMERICAN POETRY