4. Light up Lanarkshire - Gerry Cambridge

Light Up Lanarkshire (which you can read in its entirety at the link) is a single poem pamphlet, about eight (small) pages long, and also a memoir. The cover shows a photograph of the author’s grandparents, dressed up in their best clothes. James Cambridge, grandfather, was a miner, and the poem pictures him unromantically:

…a stern old man
White-chest-haired, in his long johns rising to pee dark amber
In the reek of ammonia into a pot he kept under the bed,
Or waving his walking stick at me,
All stubbly threat, from his big armchair

But it’s details like this that give the poem its resonance, partly because they display an authentic affection for those who worked down the pits, but also because of phrases like “all stubbly threat”, capturing character and description with great poetic economy.

The poem isn’t just a memory of the past. It connects with the present and future. Light is a constant refrain, in contrast to the dark world of the pits and to the essential darkness of a lump of coal. The poem begins, ‘Lanarkshire’s built on light, of light,’ and leads some fifteen lines later to:

And what is coal? Coal is a terse, black language
You could translate to the rustling tongues of money.
It is stilled fire. It is a sunbird locked in an ebony cage.
It is light made solid.

Political exploitation, dignity in adverse conditions, the necessity of not taking anything for granted – Gerry Cambridge scatters these themes through the poem and makes the writing look simple, which is often the hardest kind of poem to make work. There's no modish irony or ambiguity, no unexpected personal epiphany. It's contemporary, but not in thrall to current trends. In so many ways, that's refreshing.

There were a few lines I felt weren’t needed, and the first simile seems imprecise (trees locking up the sun’s light “like a miner descending day after day into dark”?), but the poem unfashionably makes its point without beating about the bush, calling to memory those:

Who spat out their soul in black dust on the paving stones,
Whose ossified lungs permitted clear skin and flowers in vases.

Remember them, when the lights switch on.

3. Tony Lawrence - Landing on Eros

I’d planned, in the distant past, to review a a bunch of chapbooks, but found the time only to do two. I’m going to have another shot, but these will be mini-reviews, 250 words max – hardly ideal, but more manageable for me, given constraints on my time.

Tony Lawrence’s book, Landing on Eros, one of several chapbooks he’s self-published, is an entertaining read. There is an outer space theme, bringing unity to the collection. The real subject of most poems is the human condition – questions on love, metaphysics, loneliness.

Some make clever use of metaphor, such as Dark Energy. If the Tyrannosaurus Rex had, contrary to expectation, been successful:

he would destroy all of the others,
and then
his meteoric rise burnt out
fall in upon himself;
a dark body
moving too fast
in the wrong place.

Many work with suggestion, implication, a hint of unsettling mystery, such as Barnard’s Star:

There are two kinds of space with their own stars,
the dark and light,
that coexist.

The dark stars wander like so many ghosts
blind among tombstones.

There is one near us now.

It will come close
until its night
enters our own day
and shows
in the absent soul of the ghost
the living eye on the dead face.

I’d guess the presence of an editor would have tightened up some of the poems, and sorted out a few technical flaws. Also there are 36 poems in this chapbook, often two to a page. I felt that, cut to 20-24 or so, the book would have been stronger as a whole. But I still enjoyed this stimulating trip through Tony Lawrence’s mind.

There’s no information on how to buy this chapbook. It costs £4. If anyone wants to get hold of a copy, let me know by email (address at my profile) and I’ll let Tony know.

Chapbook 2 - The Boy Who Came Ashore by Alan Gay

The second of this series of reflections on chapbooks.

Alan Gay’s chapbook centres around the Eyemouth Disaster of 14 October 1881 when a storm raged along the east coast of Scotland. It destroyed entire fleets and killed hundreds of people. The fishing village of Eyemouth, a microcosm of the whole event, saw 213 dead, one third of the male population. In addition to the loss of life, the blow to the livelihood of the communities was incalculable.

Alan Gay’s aim is to tell the story from the point of view of the fishermen who were on the seas that day, as most of the historical accounts come, understandably, from family and community members who remained on land. Gay is well qualified to attempt this, as he is an experienced yachtsman who has seen many storms in his life, and currently lectures in meteorology and navigation.

The chapbook contains 16 poems, interspersed by useful prose background, source material that may be genuine or invented (either way, it seemed authentic), and an occasional illustration. The poetry is direct, spare, unsentimental, and succeeds in conveying the tragedy without becoming maudlin. I found a couple of the poems, Recipe and Islands in the Sky artificial – imposing a ingredient-metaphor and a too self-conscious dream onto a reality that didn’t require such artifice – but the other fourteen poems had a real vigour about them that hooked me in and kept me there.

Gale Warning has the fishing boats setting out to sea. The boats were full of experienced seamen, used to storms, but not with the sudden intensity and violence of the storm to come. The gulls circling the boats seemed to know:

shadows criss-crossing the deck
urgent, as if to warn us
to heed the signs:

the heel of a hand on the horizon
fingers reaching out
to crush the sun.

The poems describing the storm and the fishermen’s reactions to it were well researched and described as only someone who has seen a storm or two could manage. At times, I would have liked a little more lyricism alongside the narrative, but there is certainly a compelling surge, a direct power about the descriptions, so that you can almost feel you’re on the boat, seeing things through the fishermen’s eyes.

In The Hurkurs, the boat slows in a trough and is then lifted onto the crest of a wave. This, Alan Gay explains in a note, is the most dangerous moment for a boat, when the loss of momentum leaves it most defenceless against the wind. On the crest, they catch sight of rocks downwind, with land just beyond the rocks:

a picture we carry into the next trough
and know there’s no escape.
Better the sea’s rage
than the madness of land.

You can sense intimately the desperate plight of the men and the equally desperate decisions that had to be made. It was safer to stay at sea in the jaws of the storm than to risk heading for land, although some boats did make land. One was hurled by a wave over the rocks clean onto the sand and landed with every mast intact. Many were not so lucky.

If there is an epic quality to these poems, there is also a quiet sadness and, at times, even a mysterious quality. Hares on Twin Law Cairns begins with the curious:

In the dawn I see myself wade free of the sea

as if the narrator is watching himself from somewhere else. He climbs through the hills and recounts the intricate, familiar details of place names, smells, and natural life. He walks all day until he sees his father’s house reddening in dusk:

He is standing in the doorway
arm raised to shield his squint.
He knows I am coming.

But, as readers, we can’t help feeling that he will never come and that the father is still there squinting into the dusk. A very good poem.

The final poem, Lost at Sea, concerns a woman - her glance both to the future and to the past, which contains hope, grief, longing, all in one simple image:

She pauses to watch her cradled baby
reach for racing clouds

that now and then open
for shafts of sun to search the waves.

The Boy who Came Ashore was published in 2006 by Glasgow-based Dreadful Night Press and can be purchased online (credit card or PayPal) at the Scottish Pamphlet Poetry site for £5.50.

Chapbook 1 - High Auchensale by Jim Carruth

Here’s the first of my reflections on chapbooks. I thought I’d start with a good one, Jim Carruth’s High Auchensale.

Jim Carruth’s first chapbook, Bovine Pastoral, took cows as its subject and enabled him to reflect on the rural world – its past and its threatened future. Cows may not sound like promising material for poems, but the book was never less than engaging.

This second volume revisits Jim Carruth’s childhood on the farms, his decision not to take on the family farm himself, and his return visits as an adult. But these are not simply dead memories. They are vivid recollections, which have living resonance for readers today, even those who live far from a rural environment. There are no romantic rural idylls here, but the harsh smell of earth. There is loss and hardship, but also humour and a stubborn commitment to the future.

The style is accessible, but not simplistic. They are obviously poems that have been lived and earned.

The first poem, Homecoming, metaphorically sets out what he is trying to do. He drives to the farm, after being away for a time, and pictures the welcome he is about to receive;

…and my words,
faltering and uncertain,
like the unsteady steps of an Ayrshire calf
staggering towards her mother
with a hunger new born.

The first half of the book concentrates on childhood – the school Robert Burns recital competition in which he is beaten by an English boy who “was modulating his voice/ in exaggerated accents/ contorting his face in false passion…” He remembers his mother's hands weaving tapestries, hands that his daughter still watches today. He recalls with a shudder the kisses of great aunts. My favourite was Dancing Girls, a poem about racing down the riverbank against cans of Tenants Lager, which were floating downstream. These cans at the time were adorned with pictures of glamorous models. The poem, typically, is more than just a memory. It acts on the present-day reader, imposes itself on the moment, by finishing:

Days when fleeting beauty
was more important
than the promise within.

In Drowning Kittens, a fine poem when the father tells his son they can't keep some new-born kittens, the son imagines his father tying them in a sack and throwing them in the river. He feels real grief. He turns to his father and:

Two kittens lie cradled broken-necked across his left hand;
the last, chapped eyes wide open against a roughcast wall.

That’s where I think it should have ended, but the poem has a final line:

We stand silent, tethered together by their mother’s cries

which goes too far in trying to milk the image. The mother’s cries have less power than the “last, chapped eyes.” There’s a climax, followed by something far less climactic. But if I whiten out that final line, it’s a terrific poem.

The second half is made up of visits to the farm as an adult. Death features prominently in many of the poems, a sense of aging and decay. In Siege, a council estate built near the farmland expands, along with the associated urban problems, brilliantly captured in the simple image:

In the woods
an old fridge opens up.

In Inheritance, he returns to the farm. He and his father, neither of whom work the farms full-time any more, help out with the cow milkings. A shared passion for the place remains, and a connection that can’t ever be broken:

And while we are able
we’ll always come back
each to be judged in turn
by what we pass on to others,
but not now as we bring in the cows
Away back,
Get away back,
Two voices in the failing light
calling out together.

High Auchensale contains well-written and sharply observed poems, which repay several reads. It’s well worth the £5. One problem with the chapbook is that it contains no details about how to purchase it! However, you can buy it by credit card, cheque, or PayPal, at the Scottish Pamphlet Poetry site.

My Plan

Over the next while, I plan to write short pieces on this blog on poetry chapbooks I’ve read – not reviews exactly, but more responses and reflections. I’ll try to give a flavour of what a given chapbook is like, quote a few sections from poems, and say what I think.

Here’s a list of chapbooks I plan to comment on (in no particular order), although this may change if I read more:

A Secret History of Rhubarb – Anna Crowe (Mariscat)
Pillars of Salt – Judy Brown (Templar)
High Auchensale – Jim Carruth (Ludovic)
Landing on Eros – Tony Lawrence (Tiplaw)
Twenty-Three Poems – Michael Mackmin (HappenStance)
Under the Threshold - Dorothy Lawrenson (Perjink)
Under the Clock – Tony Harrison (Penguin)
Stephanie Green – Glass Works (Cat’s Pyjamas)
Eftirs/Afters – Donny O’Rourke and Richard Price (Au Quai)
The Theory of Everything – James Wood (HappenStance)
The Boy who Came Ashore – Alan Gay (Dreadful Night)
Peeling Onions – Anna K. Dickie (Tyne and Esk Writers)
The Small Hours – Tom Duddy (HappenStance)
The Faithful City: Visual Poems – Stephen Nelson (afterlight)
Light Up Lanarkshire – Gerry Cambridge
Uncertain Days – Gill McEvoy (HappenStance)
Demon – Edwin Morgan (Mariscat)

and that should keep me going until June at least…