NorthwordsIssue 16 NowAutum 2010

A Passion For Assynt MANDY HAGGITH, PÀDRAIG MACAOIDH & ALASDAIR MACRAE on NORMAN MACCAIG’s love for the ‘most beautiful corner of the land’ Poems and stories from LESLEY HARRISON, JIM TAYLOR, JIM CARRUTH, PAUL BROWNSEY & many more Reviews of the best new Scottish Books including ROBERT ALAN JAMIESON, ANGUS PETER CAMPBELL & NEIL GUNN

The FREE literary magazine of the North Extract by kind permission of the Oxfort Dictionary and Cormack’s & Crawford’s, Dingwall and Ullapool.

Victor Frankenstein used electricity to animate his monster. William McGonagall was struck by lightning while walking from Dundee to Braemar. William Falkner wrote ‘As I lay Dying’ while working at a power plant. The Next Great Author clicks the ‘Save’ button. Electricity drifts through the circuits. Electricity: from the frog-twitchings of galvanism to modern domesticated electrons.

For electricity under control, contact:

Electrical, environmental and general services. Inverfarigaig, Loch Ness 07712589626

Boswell, being angry at her, threw the mutton chops out of the window. I ventured outside to see what Forres might offer a traveller. The main street was broad and fair though the brats on the street were impertinent. However they left off their games when we came upon a market, whereat they called out ‘Babalu, babalu!’ and ran among the crowd. I had not encountered this word before. A courteous woman explained it thus: somewhere in this place there is an object which you will desire, though you know not what it may be. A curious word, yet cogent. I am resolved to enter it into my Dictionary.

BABALU Full of things you will want. 65 High Street, Forres

A Quinquereme is making for Inverness, carrying sandalwood and trinkets from Nineveh. On dusty Southern roads, a bullock-cart heads North, laden with mandrake roots and bales of cotton. A full-rigged clipper comes sailing around the headland, bearing aromatic gums from Australia and trousers from Thailand. A thousand voices cry out: ‘Weel done, Cutty Sark!’

Difficult to believe? Well, it isFar Fetched.

Farfetched Funky clothes for funky people. Tucked in a corner off Baron Taylor’s Street, Inverness Northwords Now

Contents Northwords Now 4 An Island Cycle Poems By RICHIE McCAFFERY A three times yearly literary magazine published by Northwords, a not-for-profit 5 Writing on The Wild Side company, registered at February 2005. LINDA CRACKNELL and The Black Isle Words Festival Address 6 White Fluffy Clouds PO Box 15066, Dunblane, FK15 5BP Short Story by JIM TAYLOR www.northwordsnow.co.uk Poem by ROB EWING Board members. 7 Irish Stew Adrian Clark (Chair), Ann Yule, Short Story by MANDY HENDERSON Valerie Beattie, Kristin Pedroja 8 Farpais Figsin Ghàidhlig/Gaelic Fiction Competition Editor Chris Powici, [email protected] 9 Mongolian Poems by LESLEY HARRISON Gaelic Editor 10 The Assynt Of Norman Rody Gorman, [email protected] Essay by ALASDAIR MACRAE Advisory Group 11 A Man In Assynt Jon Miller, Peter Urpeth, Pam Beasant By NORMAN MacCAIG Designer 12 Bho Duine ann an Asainte Gustaf Eriksson translation by PÀDRAIG MacAOIDH www.gustaferiksson.com 14 A Passion for Assynt Front cover image Poem by MANDY HAGGITH ‘Wilds of Assynt’ by David Cameron. By kind permission from Perth Museum and Art Gallery. 15 The Poetrie o Flora Garry Essay by W.S MILNE. Contacts NNow Manager: Angus Dunn’ 16 Poems by THERESA MUÑOZ & MARION McCREADY [email protected] 17 Love to Somewhat Subscriptions Short Story by PAUL BROWNSEY The magazine is FREE and can be picked up at locations across Scotland. See list on P23 18 Poems by JIM CARRUTH The fee for individual ‘home-delivery’ is £6 19 Poems by ELIZABETH M. RIMMER, SAMUEL TONGUE, for 3 issues, cheques payable to ‘Northwords’. COLIN WILL, HAMISH WHYTE & HEATHER REID Submissions to the magazine are welcome. 20 REVIEWS They can be in Gaelic, English and any local variants. They should be sent to the 23 CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOGRAPHIES postal address – see above. Unsolicited E-mail attachments will not be opened. WHERE TO FIND NORTHWORDS NOW The material should be typed on A4 paper. Contact details and SAE should be included. EDITORIAL We cannot return work that has no sae. Copyright remains with the author. o my mind all three syllables of the phrase I’m also delighted that this issue gives space to revisiting ‘Northwords Now’ ring true. ‘North’ and ‘words’ are the life and work of a rather too easily overlooked writer. The next issue is planned for late March 2011 Tunequivocal signals of the magazine’s geographical W.S Milne’s article on Flora Garry not only celebrates a poet leaning and its content. But that small word ‘Now’ is equal- with an acute and vivid feel for place, it also reminds us – if The Board and Editor of Northwords Now ly important. I want Northwords Now to be unashamedly any reminder were needed - of the rich linguistic diversity acknowledge support from Inverness & Nairn modern. It might seem, then, a touch perverse to devote of the north of Scotland. Enterprise, the Scottish Arts Council, Hi-Arts so much of this current issue to voices from the past. But Finally, I can’t end this editorial without acknowledging and Bòrd na Gàidhlig.Council and the truth is that writers draw sustenance from their literary the passing of Scotland’s makar, Edwin Morgan. He left a Hi-Arts. forbears even as they keep a weather eye on the present and, body of work so rich and diverse I suspect it will take many for that matter, the future. The work of Norman MacCaig years before its full value can be assessed. In the meantime ISSN 1750-7928 is a prime example of this principle. In this, the centenary there is plenty to enjoy in the writings of a man whose reach year of his birth, he doesn’t so much cast a shadow over was not just national but global – perhaps even cosmic given contemporary Scottish poetry as a subtly revealing light. the fascination with space travel in his poetry, most notably in Mandy Haggith’s ‘response’ to ‘A Man in Assynt’, shows From Glasgow to Saturn. Edwin Morgan also left a very tangi- just how revealing that light can be, and this is amplified by ble legacy in the shape of the Edwin Morgan Travel Bursary Pàdraig MacAoidh’s translation of MacCaig’s poetry. Alasdair for young poets. Richie McCaffery has been a grateful ben- Macrae’s article provides a lucid insight into MacCaig’s fas- eficiary of this bursary. His poems in this issue (see page 4) cination with questions of history, identity, language and en- were written before the death of Edwin Morgan, but I’m vironment. These questions are as relevant today as when ‘A sure Richie will not mind if, in place of an obituary, we let Man in Assynt’ was written, some forty years ago. The voice his ‘Island Cycle’ stand not just as a fine sequence of poems of Norman MacCaig is that of a profoundly modern poet; in its own right, but also as Northwords Now’s own tribute one who is deeply aware of the past but never more so than to a remarkable literary life. n when it ‘irrupts’ into the present. Chris Powici, Editor

3 Northwords Now An Island Cycle Poems by Richie McCaffery

In 2009 Richie McCaffrey was awarded an Edwin Morgan Travel Bursary. He bought a second-hand Raleigh, a Calmac ticket and headed for the islands. These are some of the poems that emerged from his journey.

Kinloch Castle, Rum Glen Carragriech Ferry from Raasay

We lie in an old servant’s brass bed Flora from a medieval grimoire: Leaving Raasay on my 23rd birthday, in this palace of ‘purposeful idleness’. tormentil, bog asphodel from the sweaty ferry window a trio Left idle after no domestic returned and devil’s bit scabious. of bottle-nose dolphins scimitar from the voracious muck of Ypres. in jumpy brine of the Little Minch. On the wall the deer are in velvet Clouds coiffeur themselves in peat stained corries. That shagreen in blurred slatiness or gralloched in lifeless oil paintings. The bone china skull seemed choreographed, a tourist trick. Tonight we all sleep more or less in ruins, But they kept weaving the waves, you and me in all this baronial mould of a golden plover oscillating between two worlds. and the deer on the fens in blackhouses has joined the stones. of an caroa mor, on beds of clover. Selfless makar, to sing On my own, cycling from Sconser I felt there was something in the muirs a tiny coronach for every and along the boot-lace liquorice roads winged death and make that I had to keep up with, at any cost. Glen Mundi this lichenous silence its own. Not the destination, nor what I’d find I see the heart in need of healing but the dicey wealth of going forward, in foxgloves that grow like bruises to never coast in foamy after-thoughts by a broken style at the wood’s edge. Arran of the voyage, or spin forever in its eddies.

My shoes will see me a few more miles, We have got lost on purpose. conifers and ditches go motte and bailey I altered the map as we went along, against me, light goes like angels’ share. the way you edit your pinchbeck life. Luskentyre Bay, Harris Now no rivers will be posted to the sea. One day I will bed this agate each root We loggerheaded a long car cortege clings to, until then I think of her, the seed- We stand on the edge of a dolmen, led by a rain-beetle black Daimler hearse. splitting crack her buttons made as I undid and look in to its flooded chamber. It held a dead islander, a tweed weaver I have become a kist for your ashes. whose loom had ran grey then white, them. I am not lost in this thicket, Nature Your cigarette flares, a fierce full-stop. from ancestral blanket to ashen shroud. is a slattern who doesn’t care where odd earrings are. I could almost make They buried him near the dunes of the bay, where dry sand falls like flaxen water. this cosmic cold my own, but I still hack Fairy Pools, Skye We agreed it was a good place to spend and moth towards the glow, where she is, forever. Since then, when we make love in the valley of warm milk and soft voice. We pitched our tent that evening I feel the waves keep time between us. in the basalt glower of the Cuillins and went barefoot for firewood. In the pines, in a fern glade a burn ran like marbles over rocks. Fairy Glen, Uig

Huddled around your pocket radio Walked to Fairy Glen in the dark, that night, we danced blanketed. the moon was a nickel-plated spoon A song called ‘Secret Heart’ came on. glowing at the bottom of a lochan- Through hailstorms and squalls a voice from the dark wavelengths. not the huge satellite casting its argent ore over the county I held you like a decanter where I was born. in the tent, pouring splashingly. We were the only people alive. Things are getting smaller I was all kaleidoscopes and adrenalin the further and farther I go. and never told you it was my first time.

4 Northwords Now

accompanied some of the way by descend- ants of people who remembered Sven and Writing On The Wild Side helped him on his journey, not only served to heighten a sense of connection with the land Linda Cracknell and The Black Isle Words Festival but also put her in touch with the past. As far By Greg Malley as Linda is concerned, walking is not about ‘escaping people, but understanding how the land is peopled; walking is a way of connect- ing with history as well as nature.’ It has also meant facing new creative challenges. Linda freely, and somewhat gleefully, admits to a leaning toward ‘verbosity’ in her non-fiction. This is something that ‘Linda Cracknell the short story writer’ guards against, but which ‘Linda Cracknell the essayist’ clearly finds a wee bit ‘liberating’, as if the principle of ‘free- dom to roam’ should extend to the written word as well as the landscape. Linda has also brought her experience as a writer and walker to bear in her editing of A Wilder Vein (Two Ravens Press), a collection of ‘new literary non-fiction that focuses on the relationship between people and the wild places of Britain and Ireland.’ Clearly Linda remains excited and enthused by the variety of writing in A Wilder Vein. The hallmark of these ‘essays’ isn’t that they explore wilder- ness according to the out-moded rubric of ‘man conquering nature’. Rather, what im- presses Linda is how the writers show how the wild is present ‘as much on the fringes, and in the nooks and crannies of our towns and cities as it is in our moorlands and forests.’ According to Linda, a writer like Katharine Macrae evokes the ways in which ‘a fusion between emotion and landscape’ is possible in the most unlikely of settings – in this con- text ‘the strange flat landscape’ between Hull Cycling Wild - Linda Cracknell on The Black Isle and the North Sea. ‘Of course nature matters’ Linda explains, ‘but we also need to cultivate a feeling for wildness if we’re not to get bogged ext to Edinburgh or Wigtown, Friday evening ‘local authors’ Kenny Taylor, ceilidh and reading party gave a hint of just down in received opinions about what counts The Black Isle Words Festival Angus Dunn, Jim Miller and Anne MacLeod how much ‘local talent’ can be found in this as wild or not.’ N(September 10th-12th) may be one swapped accounts of the history of the festival corner of Scotland. Earlier in the day poet One ‘received opinion’ Linda was happy to of the smaller of Scotland’s literary gatherings, and, along the way, the role of place in their Gerry Cambridge (see Northwords Now 15) put to rest when editing A Wilder Vein was that but in this case small is not only beautiful but work. I confess that I’m inclined to treat the and short story writer, playwright, and essayist nature writing was something done by men. also rather beguiling. For a start there’s the phrase ‘local author’ with a fair degree of cau- Linda Cracknell led a workshop in the local The trails blazed by Rachael Carson, Annie town of Cromarty with its lanes and vennels, tion but these are serious literary practition- woods. I caught up with Linda shortly after Dillard and, more recently, Kathleen Jamie its impressive Georgian townhouses rubbing ers and their discussion was peppered with the festival to talk about Cromarty, and walk- were being further opened out by a host of shoulders with low-built cottages, giving the enough humour, insight and sheer writerly ing and writing. new, or comparatively little known, women impression of a sort of intimate and agreeably nous to keep the audience on its toes. According to Linda, the great thing about writers. Linda doesn’t try to conceal a smile anarchic architectural dance. Then there’s the The festival also joined the local to the The Black Isle Festival is ‘the slim differen- of pride, and pleasure, in letting me know that Cromarty Firth, on one side of the town – universal through its major theme: Where tiation between readers and audience’. This as many women as men contributed work to blue and glittering and reigned over by cor- Wild Things Are. Sharon Blackie, from the became particularly apparent during the A Wilder Vein. However, the idea that writ- morants, gulls and the odd oil rig; on the oth- Lewis-based Two Ravens Press, talked pas- ‘walking workshop’. ‘I could feel a real sense ing by women necessarily leads to a different er, verdant woods and fields. The size of the sionately of how the impact of a wild set- of place emerge’ she explains, especially when vision of nature is ‘far from certain’. Indeed festival also means that it’s intimate, friendly, ting resonates with her mission as a publisher the group paid a visit to the local ‘Gaelic Linda’s approach to writing and environment, inclusive and able to achieve a sense of focus (and novelist) to bring to light kinds of writ- Chapel’. Though now in ruins the fact that though informed by passion and care, is re- that its larger siblings on the book calendar ing that challenge accepted ways of living. Sir the beginnings of a wood – or, as Linda insists freshingly free of ideological certainties. As can’t really match. The fact that most of the John Lister-Kaye not only gave a mini-histo- ‘a sacred grove’ – is now springing up within she puts it, ‘The ways in which we experi- events take place in the comfortable and at- ry of nature writing in English, he treated the what remains of the walls means that its spir- ence and write about nature are as diverse as tractive confines of the recently renovated audience to a selection of his own experience itual significance is taking on a new form. nature itself.’ ‘Old Brewery’ only adds to the pleasure from his latest ‘nature memoir’, At The Water’s Indeed the significance of ‘place’ has been Amen to that. n An important strand of this year’s festival Edge. This included a memorable description central to Linda’s recent work as a writer, was Cromarty’s own literary history. Saturday of a dry stone wall as a ‘weasel cathedral’. It’s as well as a teacher of creative writing. A A Wilder Vein, edited by Linda Cracknell and with afternoon was given over to two very enlight- good to see that it’s not just poets who know Creative Scotland award in 2007 gave her the a foreword by Robert Macfarlane, is published by ening talks on the work of Cromarty author how to turn an engaging rhyme. The festival opportunity to explore place through a se- Two Ravens Press Jane Duncan whose My Friends series of nov- culminated with a talk form award-winning ries of what she calls ‘purposeful walks’. These (www.tworavenspress.com). els made her, in the sixties, one of Scotland’s nature writer Jay Griffiths on the links be- included following an old drove road from best selling writers. One senses that the tween language and nature, and environmen- Perthshire to Skye, re-creating a journey her mood for a literary reappraisal is nigh. Mairi tal and human justice. Challenging stuff to be father had made through the alps, and tracing Two of the walks Linda Cracknell has written about Hedderwick (illustrator of Jane Duncan’s sure, but relevant, contemporary and above all the route of a Second World War Norwegian as a result of her Creative Scotland Awards have children’s books) and Fiona Thomson, from clear-sighted and intelligent. resistance fighter, Sven Sømme, who escaped now been published as ‘pocketbooks’. Details of Leeds Trinity University, shed a revealing But The Words Festival is about more than imprisonment, and almost certain execution Whiter Than White and The Beat of Heart Stones, light on how Jane Duncan’s far from ordinary a ‘passive’ audience lapping up words of wis- by the Nazis, by escaping across the moun- as well as Linda’s other work, can be found at life informed her work as a novelist. On the dom from published writers. The Saturday tains into Sweden. The fact that Linda was www.lindacracknell.com

5 Northwords Now White Fluffy Clouds Short Story by Jim Taylor

hen Old Peter finally retired giving her the size, but still he’d trusted her. keeping busy and he knew May would ap- rest of them. But standing up to his own son as groundwork foreman for He took the breeks to the tailor and asked for prove, especially about keeping Lena’s garden had been a different sort of challenge. When WMK Lawrence, he got into the the usual modifications. Sure enough, when right for her, after the way she’d stuck by Young Peter came back from a dinner break oil painting big-time. Snowbound log cab- he got them back, they turned out to be four them when they were still new in the place with a drink in him - not for the first time ins, mainly, in the style of the old west. He inches short and bell-bottoms to boot. Talk and Young Peter was having all his problems. - and started throwing his weight around, he tried to keep Doreen from coming round the about Coco the Clown. Anyway, when the consultant admitted him knew he was going to have to sack the boy house, because he knew she would start going It wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted an- on the spot for a fifty-fifty operation, he had just to show the same rules applied to eve- on about the smell of the turps. Meanwhile, yone finding out about and he thought he to inform his next of kin. Thank God that ryone. It was one of those no-win situations, his collection of Bob Ross videos, The Joy was safe enough putting them in a black was at least possible these days. but he hadn’t bargained on a punch in the of Painting, grew to line the TV cabinet and sack for the jumble sale, in amongst a heap It was twenty years since Young Peter had face and a ten-year family split. some of his shelves. Sun-dappled woodland of other old jumpers and junk, but, true to knocked him on his backside on site, ten since Inevitably, it was Doreen who took his call paths, frozen Alpine lakes, a Mexican village form, Doreen found the bag and had a good they’d started talking again and one since the from the hospital and started going on about at sunset; Bob Ross could knock them out in rummage to see what he was throwing out. boy had come round for a heart to heart about prior warning, but when Old Peter came to minutes, but the real holy grail for Peter was When she wanted to know whose the child- his problems with Doreen. They ended up from the op, it looked as if she and Young Peter the translucent breaking wave scene. Despite size flares were, he had to come clean. She’d sitting under Old Peter’s first framed master- had made it to the bedside in double quick what Bob had to say about self-belief, that mentioned it about fifty times since. piece – a cabin, with gently smoking chimney time. They were a bit out of focus, but then wave required more than just a leap of faith. Like the day he came back from church. and a welcoming light in the window, sitting Doreen seemed to loom large and he realised Peter even had a framed picture of the man She was in the middle of telling him to clear snugly under two conifers. “Everyone needs she was putting his specs on for him. Behind himself on his mantelpiece, in amongst the the bruck out of the back room, how much a friend,” Bob Ross had said about adding in the couple was a window and the clouds in family portraits. That was one thing that had to contribute to Angela’s graduation gift and that second tree. the sky were the type Bob Ross always put in never sparked any comments, but they all who was and wasn’t being invited to Pauline’s “It’s no bad, Dad,” Young Peter had admit- his pictures – small, white, fluffy ones. Young knew he’d had thirteen years to get used to wedding, when all of a sudden the youngest ted. Peter took his hand and for a second they his own company. grandson asked him if there were animals up “Aye. I ken the proportions are a bit out, were back at the school gates. Big Peter had Not that May was ever completely out of in heaven, Charlie the black Lab being not but…” knocked off early to pick Wee Peter up after the equation. Fresh flowers on a Sunday and long in the ground. He didn’t want to hurt the He’d tried to think of Bob Ross’s quiet, his first day. Wee Peter had been hit by a big a quiet word about family, often concerning boy’s feelings, but there was no point stuffing reassuring style, while telling the boy about boy and Big Peter was telling him to make Doreen’s latest. It was easy to sense May’s re- kids’ heads with nonsense. The afterlife wasn’t marriage not always being easy and how he’d sure and hit him back harder the next day. sponse. She had always known how to keep a safari park. Doreen rebuked him right in had many a barny with May. He neglected to “Sorry for the bum steer,” Old Peter told things like daughters-in-law in perspective. front of the bairns. Who in the hell did he mention that most of them had been about his adult son. Realising his visitors didn’t un- Who would have known you could have a think he was, Francis of Assisi in reverse? Young Peter himself. But they hadn’t had derstand, and wanting to show he was still on laugh with the dead, but you could. They’d “Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s what I believe their troubles to seek - Police never away top of things, Old Peter suddenly asked the even had a chuckle together about his faux and the boy’s nearly twelve.” from the door. He’d stopped using the belt time, though he had no idea what day it was. pas over the dungarees. “Well you’re nearly sixty-eight and you when Young Peter looked him in the eye and Young Peter told him it was half past four Any time Old Peter needed a new pair can’t buy yourself a pair of trousers.” said, “This is how you get your kicks, isn’t it?” and then closed his eyes, because he knew just of trousers, he was in the habit of going to One thing he’d managed to keep to him- Getting him a place at work had seemed like what the old guy was going to say next. White’s in town, where the guy knew exactly self was the scan appointment in Aberdeen. the best thing as well, but that hadn’t been “It’s the last round-up,” said Old Peter. It what he needed and would just stick them in He made out he was going down to see Lena easy. was what he had always announced at work, a bag - none of that changing room palaver. Smith, who was in for another hip job. He Old Peter had faced a few guys down in his when it was time to square away. Then he would take them right round the was always doing bits and bobs for the old career as a foreman: drunks, conmen, slackards, “No, Dad. It’s no finishing time the noo.” corner to the alteration place to get them tak- wives in church and he knew, for a while, the thugs. Each time, he’d felt like Gary Cooper “No.” Old Peter nodded. It was fine to en up. However, this one time it wasn’t White family had been keeping an eye out for one in High Noon, searching for the courage to think there might still be time to plant that himself, but a young lassie behind the coun- of them snaring him – a companion for him stand alone. And to think for all this he’d been rockery for Lena. And a few more goes at the ter. Old Peter didn’t feel good about it, just in his later years – but no go. He just liked paid ninety pence an hour more than the breaking wave. n

Innocence By Rob Ewing

The back green was our nanny for the morning, like my gran’s, ragged lino, Bell cooker, walls to the rubber sheet to drown them out; and her a rumour of grass snakes and four-leaf clover bare with the decorous emptiness of poverty. emptied face—seen as we idled in the back court though in truth it was a parched scab of dust. And there, beneath her open window—soup-pot, by her door next morning—haunts me still. Sent out to flap among the washing, we tried primed with tatties, carrots, split peas, for putting Now, when I take a fill of my own mother’s soup,

to stay good. But what’s a kid to do? Bored by on later. I ask you, what were we to do? Then as much as it is good and warm and tasting the slimy scent of bins, by the oppressive the laughing thought of it made us mad: it was all of all the consolations of childhood, still a part of woodsmoke air of Avonbridge, which in its vale we could do to stop ourselves from throwing in me expects one day to break my teeth on a stone: wears a cap of smog in all but summer, we spied— stones and dirt from her back path. Which we did. or find the dregs of muck we left her with.

her window. Next to my gran’s, Mrs Craw’s: When her bad drunken son came home later, the crone who dressed in black, like her namesake, to find no soup for his tea, he hammered her. over selfsame spindling legs. So, what to do? What could we do? We listened through the wall. We peered in. Her scullery, empty; a yawning sink His roars detonated in my dreams; I crammed my ear

6 Northwords Now Irish Stew Short Story by Mandy Henderson

finger full of blue paint, like butter, as she recedes and reforms, further from com- likely lie staring at the smoke alarm on the “Why do you always give me stew?” it smears to join the rest on the wall, pletion with every brushstroke. The paint is in ceiling, daring the darkness to kick me into “Because it’s all I can manage.” Abuzzing next to the orange. I enjoy constant flux, warping her motion, keeping oblivion. “What kind is it?” the blur between the worlds when I lose fo- her slow, hiding her beneath so many layers, Leaving the studio is like leaving a life sup- “Irish. Irish stew.” cus, attraction and repulsion in equal meas- as on top, on top, on top of what’s there I port pod. I take a deep breath on exiting, hop- It’s our first conversation in- well I’m not ures, cavorting in another universe. But only paint her again. She is turning around to- ing to take as much of that pressured atmos- sure how long. I can look into those eyes now. making brown in this world. wards me, and there is nothing I can do but phere with me as possible, a tube of leaf green And be ashamed. There’s a door in this space. I hate the door. make her. in my pocket, a smear of dead paint from the “Why Irish stew?” It reminds me of other things, like what’s on I paint. She moves. I work so fast. She turns sob angel across my chest. It’s like inhaling “Because you’re from Ireland and I want the other side of it. I tried to paint it out a so slowly. In this world of purpose and sloth before diving. Because god knows how you to remember something real.” long time ago, after I’d finished covering the there is a paring of fat from the soul; insula- long I’ll have to be down there. “But people from Ireland don’t eat Irish skylight in welts of black, but still it opens, tion stripped, it begins to quiver, raw in the The bathroom fails to wash away the dirt stew every night. And I don’t even like it.” regularly, disturbing my sob angel and me. I wind. Sometimes I howl in protest at this. in my head and the bedroom fails to suspend “I know. It’s taken you a year and a half to try to think about the paint when it does, this Unaware of its rising- the preparation of my my longings. But in the kitchen something remember that.” magic ooze ringed in the colour of morning larynx, the opening of my mouth- the sound different happens. It does not protect me, the “Why is your hair blue?” grass, fuelling the surface, charging her into always shocks me into battle stance, brush as kitchen: it shouts about its cooker, its taps, its “It’s blue Gregor because nothing’s seemed movement. And she does, all the time, mil- a dagger, eyeing skylight. Door. Most of the magnetic novelty picture frames stuck to the real for a hell of a long time in this house and limetre by millimetre, muscles surfacing as she sound leaving me seems to do so without my fridge, full of unbearable images. It is fluo- I thought it would help me blend in a little rounds on me, her pivot as slow as time, as full awareness. There’s a delayed reaction in rescent in its disdain of me. Maintaining its better.” slow as I paint. As slow as my little girl grew. my ability to be in control of any utterance. occupants it stirs an everlasting pot, sneering I don’t know what’s shocking me most, My sob angel’s hair is Polynesian black, each But my internal chatter is voluble, liquid in at self indulgence, confident in its duty. And her explanation or hearing my name bowled lock never drying as it strips her back open its scathing of the world and my own pitiful now I realize just how important it is to know across the table. I’d almost forgotten I had into a barbarous violet. Some days I slap the place in it. I’ve been painting this picture for this. My wife knows this. Angela knows this. one. brush hard, punching her thigh into inches. a long time. I’ve thought of nothing else, well My wife Angela knows this. I try to look at “Why is it blue?” Sometimes I’ll dip my hand into a bucket of I think I haven’t. Left that to others. To carry her, now disturbed by the blue hair. (I could “It’s blue because it helps me to deal with slack crimson and smear the room, an offer- on normally. I alone have taken on the bur- paint her face to match. Then I wouldn’t all of this. One of us had to be real, and it was ing in the blood of a bastard. I’ll carve her den of being an arsehole, carrying the torch have to recognize her as human at all.) Are apparent from the outset that it sure as hell shoulder in thick oil. I’ll wipe it off. I’ll cut of the tortured twat. Listening to my mono- there eyes there? Can I ever look at them? wasn’t going to be you. I am just as devastated my arm. I’ll ignore the blood. Footprints in logue I ask myself awkward questions. Things Acknowledge them as the same eyes my as you, and maybe this was my way of con- nebulous hues mass around the wall – a rever- like, “How much of all of this is real and how daughter had? The same eyes our daughter necting with it all… connecting with you.” ential arc- as I paint her, paint her, paint her. much affectation?”, or ”When did you actu- had? Her ordinary, angry words overwhelm me. ally stop being a basket case?” “Are you not I look down at the food in front of me, So many, all at once. As soon as you make ten- Some days are worse than others. tired of being a prick?” “Do you ever want wondering why I’ve been eating the same tative steps into the everyday world it seems your sob angel to face you?” “Are you paint- thing for an awful long time. The wood of to want to ram you, the simpler the question I try to ignore the woman who looks ing your dead daughter?” This is the question the table is warm, as is the hand that lifts my the more terrifying the answer. I’m tempted around the door, head appearing like a pup- I’ve been asking myself the most over the last jaw. She tells me to eat and I do. to retreat but I know it’s no good. I’m in the pet in a show. She bobs there, holding on as few months. The others, although hard to be kitchen and the kitchen knows how to get its she peers over some event horizon, opens the honest about, are answerable. I can’t remem- And here I am again, back in here, the own way. hole in her face, tries to speak to the alien. ber the year previous to this increasingly lucid door closing behind me. Only this time I’m “Angela. Come with me.” Her hair looks like a wig. I think it is my wife. time. I must have been truly bereft then. Now not so sure I want to hear it closing. It’s a stu- Amazingly, she comes with me. (Leading I push my own hair back, degrading its reality it has become a habit, as appealing as candle- dio. A room. An attic at the top of the house. you up to the studio twists me into some- with a viridian coating and cross the studio to light. As I will not extinguish my candles, I Paint, once garrulous, speaking in a multitude thing new, or rather, old. I remember leading follow her to wherever she leads me. will not extinguish my grieving. of voices, now pleads with the walls in hard- you through this house to our bedroom like I’m sitting at a table looking at the plate. Any loud sound I make is inevitably fol- ened crusts, still livid underneath, as I look at this, fingertip to fingertip, your arm straight There are clods of yellow potato in between lowed by a knock, the door opening a frac- the sob angel’s profile. The profile I painted out, hand tickling mine. I knew that you liked a golden glue of carrots, the cling of lamb tion, and a brisk ”Everything okay?” lobbed the night before. to watch my bum from a step behind. I’d do a jamming it all together into a glow bowl of in from the other side. She hates coming in And I just can’t paint it anymore. wiggle, make you laugh.) juices. It’s so bright I feel I have to shut my here. I’m aware of this much. Maybe she can’t This realization rattles my heart into ac- The door of the studio remains open be- eyes as I try to get some on a fork. Where bear to look at me grasping a brush as though tion; chill streams slip through dormant hind us. I’ll never shut it again. My sob angel we’re sitting hurts my eyes. Halos seem to I might push it through my chest. Or maybe valves, re-animating. I need to get to the sky- is there in front of us, on the wall, on one surround the bubbling, humming, sloshing, it’s just the smell. light. There’s a ladder somewhere. Tripping, knee, elbow resting, heavy hair falling over edging these sounds in comfort, warming the There are around three knocks per day- scrambling, I get the damned thing. I’ve got one shoulder in black remembrance. Her face smells of home. But I can’t let it in, let any of apart from the extra ones after loud exple- a pallet knife. I can scrape off my improvised belongs to Angela. I’ve been painting my wife it in, let it sneak up on my soul. I imagine the tives- usually coinciding with bodily needs I blackout. I can do it. Do it now. for a year and a half and I didn’t even know table is a hundred feet long but still I see her. suspect I may have developed as some sort I’m standing in front of you, sweating, it. My wife is dangerous. I glance at her. And of learned behaviour triggered by the knock- breathless, recognition trickling down my Standing beside her, feeling cut open and notice that her hair is blue. She’s eating stew ing. Or is my wife telepathic and knows if back. I watch the smoke from the blown out on display, waiting for words with beaks, I and her hair is blue, the deepest cobalt of it’s sustenance I need, or an urge to evacuate candles tracing your cheek, rising towards search for her hand. I can look at her, ready mourning. in some way? I’m never sure myself until I the ancestral webs that hold up the ceiling. now for her mourning, able to envelop more hear the knock. And even then the sensation Ordinary light from a midday sun flattens than my own. In the studio I like the light low. I paint is ambiguous; knock, knock-stomach rumbles; the room. I stand shaking in it until it passes “Angela?” by candlelight. Lots of them actually. Some of knock, knock-need a crap. Or, stomach rum- over. “What is it, Gregor?” (A deep blue strand them big church ones, some of them the tea bles-knock, knock. Need a crap-knock,knock. of your once black hair wanders across your lights that everyone has by the dozen, stuffing It’s a big mystery every time, usually resolving Shadows have stretched by the time my forehead, looking for an ear. You tuck it in, the place full of synthetic strawberries. They itself. But when I’m led to the bedroom it’s stomach answers your voice from the kitchen. smiling at me.) keep me working, the candles, let me see my always a surprise; a surprise and a disappoint- I can hear our loss deepening your chords, “I’m not Irish.” sob angel flicker, let me see her fingers quiver ment. It means I’ll have to sleep, or more than felting their old clarity. It’s time to eat. “I know.” n

7 Northwords Now

Farpais Figsin Ghàidhlig Northwords Now Northwords Now Gaelic Fiction Competition

Tha Northwords Now gu math riaraichte a’ chiad fharpais- Northwords Now is delighted to announce its first Gaelic writing sgrìobhaidh Ghàidhlig aice a chur an cèill. Thèid an sgeulachd competition. The best story and flash fictions will be published in agus am figsean-clisgidh as fheàrr fhoillseachadh anns an iris the magazine and there are cash prizes. The competition is free agus tha duaisean-airgid ann cuideachd. ‘S ann an-asgaidh a tha to enter – just read through the rules and get writing! an fharpais – dìreach leugh na riaghailtean is stiall ort!

Riaghailtean na Farpaise Gabhail ri sgrìobhainnean Competition Rules Receipt of entry Sgeulachdan an-asgaidh • Cuir a-steach cairt-puist le stampa is seòladh agus Entries are free of charge • Enclose a stamped addressed postcard marked Ceann-latha mu dheireadh gus an cur a- ‘AIDEACHADH’ sgrìobhte air ma tha thu ag Closing date for receipt of entries: 31st January ‘ACKNOWLEDGEMENT’ if you require steach: 31 Faoilleach 2011 iarraidh gun tèid na chuir thu thugainn sa phost 2011 acknowledgement of receipt of your postal entry aideachadh. • It is not possible to confirm receipt of entries by 2000 facal air a’ char as motha is 1000 facal air • Cha tèid againn air stuth aideachadh air fòn no Maximum of 2000 words and minimum of phone or email a’ char as lugha airson sgeulachdan goirid post-dealain. 1000 words for short stories • Overseas entrants : please send an international • Tagraichean thall thairis: cuir cùpon eadar- reply coupon from your Post Office rather than 300 facal air a’ char as motha airson figsean- nàiseanta bho Oifis a’ Phuist agaibh seach Maximum of 300 words for Flash Fiction (no stamps. clisgidh (gun srian ris an ìre as lugha) stampaichean mas e do thoil e. minimum) Results Chan eilear a’ cunntas an tiotail am measg Toraidhean The title is NOT included in the word • Details of prize-winning entries will be printed in àireamh nam facal. • Thèid fios mun fheadhainn a bhuannaicheas a count. the Spring 2011 issue of Northwords Now. chur ann an àireamh Earrach 2011 de Northwords • Alternatively, check the website for details after Now. February 2011 Airidheachd • Air mhodh eile, cùm sùil air an làrach-lìn airson Eligibility • Tha an Duais fosgailte don a h-uile duine, fiosrachaidh an dèidh a’ Ghearrain 2011. • The Prize is open to anyone, including non-UK feadhainn an taobh a-muigh na Rìoghachd applicants, over 16 years. Copyright Aonaichte nam measg, os cionn 16 bliadhna • Entries must be written in Scottish Gaelic • Worldwide copyright of each entry remains dh’aois. Còraichean • Entries must be entirely the work of the entrant with the author, but Northwords Now will have • Feumaidh an stuth a bhith ann an Gàidhlig. • ‘S ann leis an ùghdar fhèin a tha na còraichean ach and must never have been published, self- the unrestricted right to publish the first prize short story, and the top five flash fictions, in the • Feumaidh an stuth a bhith buntainn dìreach don bidh còir gun srianadh aig Northwords Now an published, published on any website or public magazine and on the Northwords Now website.. neach-iarrtais agus gun a bhith air fhoillseachadh sgeulachd ghoirid a bhuannaicheas, agus a’ chaid online forum, broadcast nor winning or placed in a-riamh, air fhoillseachadh leat fhèin, air chòig figseanan-clisgidh, fhoillseachadh anns an any other competition. fhoillseachadh air làrach-lìn no a leithid, air a iris agus air làrach-lìn Northwords Now. • Entries submitted posthumously will not be Judging chraoladh no air a bhuannachadh no air duais a eligible. thoirt a-mach ann am farpais sam bith eile. • The judge for the competition is Rody Gorman, Breitheanas Writer in Residence at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig . • Cha bhi càil a chuirear a-steach an dèidh bàis • Is e am britheamh Rody Gorman, bàrd air • The judge’s decision is final and no individual airidh. Mhuinntireas, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. Sending Your Entry correspondence can be entered into • ‘S e dìreach am britheamh a nì am breitheanas • Post your entry to: Northwords Now, PO • The judge is unable to comment on individual agus cha bhi deasbad ann an sgrìobhadh mu Box 15066, Dunblane, Scotland, FK15 5BP. entries A’ Cur Stuth A-steach dheidhinn an dèidh làimhe. Submissions by e-mail will not be accepted. • Cuir an sgrìobhainn agad gu: Northwords Now, • Chan urrainn don bhritheamh beachdan a • Mark the envelope ‘Competition’. Bosga 15066, Dùn Bhlàthain, Alba, FK15 5BP. Cha nochdadh air sgrìobhadh fa leth. • You may submit a maximum of 2 full length short Prizes ghabhar ri stuth a chuirear a-steach le post-dealain. stories and five flash fictions. • Prizes for the short story category are: • Feuch an sgrìobh thu ‘Farpais’ air a’ chèis. • 1st £200 • Faodaidh tu suas ri 2 sgeulachd ghoirid agus còig Duaisean Entry Format • Two runners-up prizes of £50 figseanan-clisgidh a chur a-steach. • Is iad na duaisean ann an roinn nan sgeulachdan • Entries must be in Scottish Gaelic, typed, single goirid: sided, with pages numbered and securely fastened • Prizes for the flash fiction category are: • 1mh £200 with a staple. Each entry on a new sheet. • 1st £50 Cruth an Stuth • Dà dhuais de £50 an dèidh sin • Stories and flash fiction to be double spaced and a • Four runners-up prizes of £15 • Feumaidh an sgrìobhadh a bhith ann an Gàidhlig, • Is iad na duaisean ann an roinn figsean-clisgidh: word count noted at the top of the first page. • No competitor may win more than one prize in air a thaipeadh, air aon taobh, le àireamhan air na • 1mh £50 • Write your name address, telephone number, each category duilleagan agus iad ceangailte le stìnleag. Gach • Ceithir duaisean de £15 an dèidh sin e-mail address (if you have one) and the title(s) inntrinn air duilleag fa leth. • Chan fhaod farpaisiche sam bith barrachd is aon of your story or stories on a separate sheet of paper and include this with your entry. The • Beàrnan dùbailte eadar na sreathan agus omradh duais a ghleidheadh anns an dà roinn Prizewinners / prizegiving stories themselves must show no name, address or air àireamh nam facal gu h-àrd air a’ chiad duilleag. identifying marks other than the title • Prizewinners will be notified in writing by the • Sgrìobh a-steach t’ ainm, do sheòladh, an beginning of March 2011. àireamh-fòn agad, seòladh post-dealain (ma tha a Buileachadh nan duaisean • Entries are not returned, keep a copy. • It is hoped to hold a prize-winning ceremony at leithid agad) agus tiotal(an) do sgeulachd(an) air • Thèid fios a chur don fheadhainn a bheir a-mach • No corrections can be made after receipt. Sabhal Mòr Ostaig in April 2011 (details to be duilleag fa leth agus cuir seo a-steach an cois na a’ bhuaidh ro thoiseach a’ Mhàirt 2011. • Please ensure that you use the correct postage. announced) sgrìobhainn agad. Cha bu chòir gun nochd ainm, seòladh, no comharraidhean sam bith ach an tiotal • Thathar an dòchas na duaisean a bhuileachadh • Entry implies acceptance of all the rules air na sgeulachdan fhèin. aig Sabhal Mòr Ostaig sa Ghiblean 2011 (fios ri • Failure to comply with the entry requirements • Chan eilear a’ cur sgrìobhainnean air ais, feuch an tighinn). will result in disqualification cùm thu lethbhreac. Le bhith a’ cur stuth a-steach, thathar a’ gab- • Chan fhaodar ceartachaidhean sam bith a hail ris gu bheilear leagte ris na riaghailtean. dhèanamh an dèidh dhuinn na sgrìobhaidhean Mura cumar ris na feumalachdan mu chur a- fhaighinn. steach stuth, thèid airidheachd a chall. • Feuch an cleachd thu a’ phostachd cheart.

8 Northwords Now Mongolian Poems by Lesley Harrison

Lesley Harrison’s pamphlet One Bird Flying was runner-up in the NLS Callum Macdonald Memorial Award in 2010. It describes a poetic response to Marco Polo’s journey to the court of Kublai Khan, and was written during her year spent in Mongolia. These last poems were finished after the publication of One Bird Flying, and provide an epilogue to the journey.

Xalxan Province Lop North From The Journals of Marco Polo, I. 38 From The Journals of Marco Polo, I. 39 From The Journals of Marco Polo Book I:56

This land pushes all other countries to the edge At Lop there is a castle where a great market for corn Upon traveling for forty days, you reach of the map. The sky is paper white. and almonds is held, this being a fine and fruitful country. the grey levels of a frozen ocean. Its cities are painted on the air; But first you must journey for 30 days across a desert which is so vast and bitter, that neither beast nor bird is Neither men nor animals are found here. its huge rivers never reach the ocean met with. Few have traveled here; many old men fear it. The ground is sterile, starred with ice. but die along the desert Here, if you are overcome by sleep, or natural desire, and in brown pools that hold no reflection. your caravan passes round a hill and out of sight, quite An island lies off the coast: soon a once familiar voice will call you by your name here tourmalines are scattered on the earth Here the colours of the earth begin : salt lakes, crumpled and weightless back into the desert, where the air is filled with low, in such numbers that you may choose ochres bled from rock earthy music, of wind pipes and bone flutes, and thin as many as you please. But you are now so far north bells, and many sorts of soft, broken melodies, these old light trapped in bottles leading farther into and beneath the dunes. (At night, on your journey, you have entered the story tied with wool and hitched in racks a wise man will lash himself to his camel’s rein, and lie of a traveller, looking for an island, on black camels full of dust down with his charms and amulets, aligned with the path he would, at sunrise, if Allah wills, resume.) who arrives at a grey, soundless ocean, his heart their ancient, muffled feet splaying cooling in the open air, the North Star far behind. as they draw a line across the earth the sky growing flat and brown Shangtu distances receding, the ground coming closer, From The Journals of Marco Polo, I. 61 Orkney Epilogue the last tents shrinking gone. At Shangtu he keeps a stud : And then, a year later, out at Gyre ten thousand mares and geldings, all white as snow. lying hard against the sand pushing back until I felt the earth roll over Shaman These mares are seeded by the wind Transcribed from Xadag, 2007. lifting their tails in autumn, growing slow I woke with the first brush of rain, the wind blowing dislocated clouds inland, I will tell you a story. Your story. and round, turning inward with the season the islands riding deep in the current: till one day they are gone. There was a man who lived before you were born, who Now winter comes: two cranes could see you coming. He saw you in the water, in the standing in a field roots of the fire. He listened to the drumming of the cattle thin, the lines of their ribs exposed; still as stones trees, the fish beneath the ice. He found where you horns crack, frost rots off their tongues would enter the earth. He burnt stones, and called you the wind flowing round them from the colours of winter. He broke a mirror, and held their mouths a lamp-black hole of teeth and ice. like water. And as I stood, light to the sky. Now daylight recedes, red with cold they lifted their arms and ran

Now the sky is watching you. The place where you were rivers are welded to the ground; into the air, head first, like aeroplanes born is dreaming of you. The black earth, the stones in the earth turns to the moon; full tilt over hoy’s worn hills, the river bed are dreaming of you. Even the ancestors are drawing a curve in the sky dreaming of you. One day, you will go back out of the twin worlds of dry white air earth, and fly up to the outer air to meet them. The sky and bare, dismantled bones. gathering the world beneath them will open for you. The place you die will be ready. rising, growing lighter, Days are nameless; each a hung silence. leaning forward on the map’s brown lines. You will find it on your own Then one day, late in April An afternoon, a dog, a figure waving ; the wind leaves muddy footprints on the path; an empty field, full of joy - the sun burns a hole in the sky

and there are the horses, browsing the ridges like clouds broken on the grass

creatures from a strange, older country, rough hair growing down their flanks

the light slipping off them.

9 Northwords Now The Assynt Of Norman

Norman MacCaig and the Poetry of Place By Alasdair Macrae

orman MacCaig began to visit idyllic or even benign. A large stain has so Saw, and more, and its meaning. They spoke like a the historical scale, a generation’s accomplish- Assynt in the 1940s and, with his marked the MacLeods that the family is re- native ments are ‘tiny in / the misty landscape of Nfamily, he spent his summers there membered for little else. While he was under The language they walked in. history’. Nonetheless, we – the writer, the until some years before his death in 1996. the protection of MacLeod of Assynt, the be- readers, the community he explores – are hu- One of the very early poems in The Poems of trayal for money of James Graham, Marquis If they are native speakers, he is aware that man and the poem is concerned with the as- Norman MacCaig, ‘Falls of Measeach’, written of Montrose, and his execution in 1650 in he is still a learner. His reading is experimen- pirations, failures and sustaining practices of in 1948, is unusually specific in being set in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket led to the demise of tal and he explores different moods or dif- people in a particular locality. MacCaig did the spectacular Corrieshalloch Gorge on the the family and their denunciation in song and ferent relationships to the observed world, not share the religious beliefs he encountered route leading to Ullapool and Assynt from the story. As late as 1849, W.E.Ayton, the medio- ranging from awe to something approaching in Assynt, he knew that songs about battles south. Two years later he has a poem ‘Back cre poet and Professor of Rhetoric and Belles whimsicality. He anthropomorphises ele- long ago would not feed starving people in to Sutherland after a long absence’. Reading Lettres at Edinburgh (and partly responsible ments and creatures – it is inevitable – but the bad times, but he recognises in the poem through The Poems, it is noticeable that there for the introduction of English as a university there is a knowing quality, a self-mocking that continuity, a sense of shared tradition, can is a steady increase in place-names; the poetry subject) wrote of the incident: jokey intimacy, that guards the poetry from keep a society alive. Depopulation, however it becomes more localised, more geographically tweeness or sentimentality or glibness. In a happened, has left a sadness, an elegiac quality intimate, more at home in Assynt. A traitor sold him to his foes; poem such as ‘Small lochs’ he speaks of his in the area, visible in the vestiges of past and The parish of Assynt in West Sutherland O deed of deathless shame! liking for lochs ‘the smaller the better’. The now deserted settlements. The gaelic word stretches north for about a dozen miles I charge thee, boy, if e’er thou meet poem ends: larach (often anglicised as here to laroch) de- from the parish of Coigach and east for With one of Assynt’s name – scribes precisely this, ‘whose larochs / sink Be it upon the mountain’s side, about the same extent from the Atlantic (the Or yet within the glen, into the bracken’, otherwise put as ‘a rickle Minch) facing Lewis. The area is bisected by Stand he in martial gear alone, And don’t think it’s just the big ones that are lordily named. of stones’. Loch Assynt and the River Inver issuing at Or backed by arméd men – I met one once and when I asked what she was called Probably half of the poems MacCaig Lochinver and pitted with innumerable lochs Face him, as thou wouldst face the man The little thing said (without blushing, mind you) wrote after 1960 are set in Assynt, with an and lochans. Dominating the landscape are Who wronged thy sire’s renown: The Loch of the Corrie of the Green Waterfalls extraordinary variety of moods and focuses, Remember of what blood thou art, the mountains Canisp, Suilven, Cul Beag, Cul And strike the caitiff down! and a continuing inventiveness of language. Mor, Stac Polly, Quinag and Ben Mor Assynt, I know they’re just H2O in a hollow. For many readers, his most striking group of dramatically sudden surges of rock, constantly Yet not much time passes without me thinking of them poems are those he wrote on the death of his changing shape as the observer moves round And, indeed, since the MacKenzies sold Dandling lilies and talking sleepily close friends in Assynt, in particular the group them. According to J.B. Whittow in his ex- out to the House of Sutherland in 1760, the And stand huge mountains on their watery heads. ‘Poems for Angus’, on A.K.MacLeod, who cellent book Geology and Scenery in Scotland area has been subject to buyings and sellings, died in 1976. Although there are many very ‘The curious character of the mountains in notions of ownership, and fashions of exploi- dark poems in his later years, MacCaig saw the Assynt area is largely the result of the tation of the land for sheep-farming or hunt- Facts are not to be confused with our fic- himself as a celebratory poet, a person who differential weathering of contrasting rocks, ing and now tourism. Radically new ideas of tional fancies. derived much pleasure from places, weathers, brought into juxtaposition by major thrust- land-use, employment, development, com- In 1967 the Scottish BBC showed a televi- animals and, most of all, friends. He is celebra- ing’. Lewisian gneisses and Torridonian sand- munity and ownership have become possible sion film featuring MacCaig’s longest poem tory but not usually an optimist. It is for that stones to the west meet in odd disjunctions since the buy-out of 21,000 acres of North (nearly three hundred lines), A man in Assynt. reason that some readers find the conclusion with schists and quartzites and even some Lochinver by the Assynt Crofters’ Trust in Some people have seen the poem as atypical of ‘A man in Assynt’ uncharacteristic. He is limestone in the Moine thrust from the east. 1993. but, apart from its length and a certain pro- watching the movement of the tide and, after This is a site of geological fame where tec- Norman MacCaig was delighted with grammatic sequence of topics, line by line contemplating the possibility of the gradual tonic movements were first clearly observed these new possibilities but the Assynt he had and thought by thought it is characteristic of elimination of human settlement in the area, and identified by B.N.Peach and J. Horne in got to know so well was a product of some its author. It does have a political edge and where ‘man becomes / in this most beautiful 1883. of the geographical and historical elements a directness of view but these are not new. corner of the land, / one of the rare animals’, Coincidentally, in 1883 a major Royal described earlier. In the midst of geological A central question, repeated in several ways, he shifts his vision: Commission under Lord Napier was engaged givens – the mountains, rivers, lochs, sea – the concerns ownership: ‘Who owns this land- in investigating the conditions of poverty and landscape of fields, vegetation, trees, human scape?’ ‘Whom does the sea belong to?’ The And the mind hardship in the Highlands and Islands follow- settlement, animals, was largely the creation of question operates in two ways. First, there behind the eye, within the passion, ing the Clearances, the collapse of prices for the very estates he deplored, and many of his is a historical and individual sense: who has remembers with certainty that the tide will return cattle and the Potato Famine in the 1840s, best friends worked for such estates as game- bought the land, the fishing rights? and what and thinks, with hope, that the other ebb, that sad withdrawal of people, may, too, and an accelerating depopulation of the area, keepers, shepherds, gillies, house-keepers, entitles someone to speak of ‘my land’, ‘my reverse itself and flood particularly of younger men. Old men giving factors. For about thirty years the MacCaig mountains’? He is thinking of clan battles, the bays and the sheltered glens evidence to the Commission recounted the family rented a small house in Achmelvich estate-owners, developers, land-users of vari- with new generations replenishing the land names of forty-eight communities in Assynt some miles north of Lochinver, and in later ous kinds. However, and this introduces the with its richest of riches and coming, at last, emptied of their inhabitants in the earlier years they took a house in Inverkirkaig some second sense of owning, he interrupts himself into their own again. years of the century. 1883 also saw the publi- miles south of Lochinver. Over the years, his and asserts: cation of A History of the Highland Clearances knowledge of the area and its people widened by Alexander MacKenzie, a best-seller of its and deepened, and his passions for walking This hope was expressed quarter of a cen- time. Three years later, in 1886, the Crofter’s and fishing led him to explore the mountains, False questions, for tury before the Crofters’ reoccupation of Act gave some form of tenure to the people the burns and the lochs. In the earlier years he this landscape is Assynt but, although much work has to be who worked the land and who, till then, had cycled round the coastal roads. The friends he masterless done, and much disappointment will have existed largely at the whim of land-owners, made opened his senses, as he says in ‘Among and intractable in any terms to be surmounted, it may be that Assynt will that are human. often alien to the region in class, language scholars’.: emerge as a sustainable place in an increasing- and culture. The old clan system of heredi- ly fraught and beleaguered climatic situation. tary chiefs had kept Assynt in the control of On our way to a loch, two miles from Inveruplan, The poem opens with the geological set- In 2002 a memorial to Norman MacCaig was MacLeods and then MacKenzies for five hun- Three of us (keepers) read the landscape as ting and it is in this vast perspective that hu- erected near the Kirkaig Bridge to mark the dred years till 1760 when the land was sold to I read a book. They missed no word of it: man efforts, the bickering and possessiveness, local community’s appreciation of the poet. the Earl of Sutherland, the family of greatest Fox-hole, strange weed, blue berry, ice-scrape, deer’s and the ordering and communal, are pre- He would have claimed to be sardonically hoof-print. notoriety in the period of the Clearances. …. sented. The human footprint seems negligible amused at such a whigmaleerie but he would Not that the time of the clan chiefs was They saw what I against the gouging of glaciers and, even on have been deeply moved by the gesture. n

10 Northwords Now

Norman MacCaig

from A Man In Assynt

An old song. A rickle of stones. A These shapes; these incarnations, have their own determined name on a map. identities, their own dark holiness, their I read on a map a name whose Gaelic means high absurdities. See how they make the Battlefield of the Big Men. a breadth and assemblage of animals, I think of yelling hosts, banners, a perpendicularity of creatures, from where, counterattacks, deployments. When I get there, three thousand feet up, two ravens go by it’s ten acres, ten small acres in their seedy, nonchalant way, down to of boggy ground. the burn-mouth where baby mussels I feel drink fresh water through their beards – I am looking through the same wrong end or down, down still, to where the masked conger eel of the same telescope goes like a gangster through through which I look back through time the weedy slums at the sea’s foot. and see Christ, Socrates, Dante – all the Big Men Greenshank, adder, wildcat, guillemot, seatrout, picked out, on their few acres, fox and falcon – the list winds through clear and tiny in all the crooks and crannies of this landscape, all the misty landscape of history. the subtleties and shifts of its waters and the prevarications of its air – Up from that mist crowds while roofs fall in, walls crumble, gables the present. This day has lain long, die last of all, and man becomes, has dozed late, till in this most beautiful corner of the land, the church bell jerks and, wagging madly one of the rare animals. in its salty tower, sends its voice clanking through the sabbath drowse. Up there, the scraping light And dark minds in black clothes gather like whittles the cloud edges till, like thin bone, bees to the hive, to share they’re bright with their own opaque selves. Down here, the bitter honey of the Word, to submit a skinny rosebush is an eccentric jug to the hard judgment of a God of air. They make me, my childhood God would have a difficulty somewhere between them, in recognising. a visiting eye, Ten yards from the sea’s surge an unrequited passion, they sing to Him beautiful praises watching the tide glittering backward and making that surge like the sea, its huge withdrawal from beaches in a bare stone box built and kilted rocks. And the mind for the worship of the Creator behind the eye, within the passion, of all colours and between-colours, and of remembers with certainty that the tide will return all shapes, and of the holiness and thinks, with hope, that that other ebb, of identity and of the purifying light-stream that sad withdrawal of people, may, too, of reason. The sound of that praise reverse itself and flood escapes from the stone box the bays and the sheltered glens and takes its place in the ordinary communion with new generations replenishing the land of all sounds, that are with its richest of riches and coming, at last, Being expressing itself – as it does in its continuous, into their own again. its never-ending creation of leaves, birds, waves, stone boxes – and beliefs, the true and the false.

Northwords Now is grateful to Polygon, publishers of The Poems of Norman MacCaig, for their kind permission to print this extract from ‘A Man In Assynt’.

11 Pàdraig MacAoidh

Bho Duine ann an Asainte

Seann òran. Rughan chlach. Ain- m air mapa. Mi a’ leughadh air mapa an t-ainm Blàr nam Fear Mòra. Mi a’ smaoineachadh air airbhrean nuallach, sròlan, ais-ionnsaighean, imeachdan. Nuair a ruigeas mi, chan eil ann ach deich acraichean de dh’fhearann, deich acraichean beaga de bhoglaich. Mi a’ faireachdainn gu bheil mi a’ coimhead tro thaobh ceàrr ceudna na h-aon phrosbaig tron seall mi air ais a dh’fhaicinn Chrìosta, Shomhairle, Dante – gach Fear Mòr air leth, air am meanbh-acraichean fosgailte, beag bìodach ann an cruth-tìre ceothach na h-eachdraidh. Suas on cheò: an t-àm làthaireach a’ dòmhlachadh. Laigh an là seo ro fhada, chaidil e a-staigh, gus an do snaoth clag na h-eaglaise, a’ bogadh gun chiall na thùr saillte, a’ craoladh a ghuth, a’ trostadh tro shuain na Sàbaid. ’S aignean dorcha ann an aodach dubh a’ cruinneachadh mar sheilleanan chun na cuirceige, gus mil shearbh an fhacail a phàirteachadh, gus gèilleadh a thoirt gu breitheanas cruaidh Dhè nach aithnicheadh ach air èiginn Dia mo leanabais. Deich slatan bho ataireachd na mara seinnidh iad Ris luaidhean eireachdail a bhios ag at mar a’ mhuir, ann am bogsa bàn air a thogail de chloich gus adhradh a thoirt do dh’Ùghdar gach datha ’s eadar-dhatha ’s crutha, agus naomhachd dearbh-aithne agus sruth-sholais iom-ghlanadh cèille. Tha fuaim na luaidh’ ud a’ teicheadh on bhogsa-chloiche gus àite ghabail ann an Òrdugh cumanta gach fuaim. ’S e th’ annta Bith ga foillseachadh fhèin – mar a bhios ann an cruthachadh leantainneach, gun chrìoch, de dhuilleagan, de dh’ eòin, tuinn, bhogsaichean-chloiche – agus de chreideamhan, den fhìrinn, den bhreug. Na cruthan seo, na feòil-ghabhlaichean: tha aca fhèin an dearbh-aithnean suidhichte, an naomhachd dhorch’, am fìor bhaothaireachd. Faic ciamar a nì iad leud ’s bannal de bheathaichean, dìreachd de chreutairean às an tèid, aig trì mìle slat de dh’àirde, dà fhitheach nam flanerie mosach nonchalant, a-nuas do bheul an uillt, far an òl feusgain òga bùrn tron fheusagan – no shìos, nas fhaide sìos, gu far an tèid an easgann-shùileach sgàilichte mar Chorleonach tro shluma lusach grunnd na mara. Deoch-bhiugh, nathair, cat-fiadhaich, breac-mara, gearra-bhreac, sionnach, seabhag – an liosta a’ snaigheadh tro gach cùil den chruth-thìre seo, tro gach geur-chùis ’s geur-ghluasad uisgean agus tro cheabhachdaireachd àile, fhad’s a thuiteas tughaidh, a mhìn-bhris ballaichean. ’S e an stuadh a bhàsaicheas mu dheireadh, gus am fàs clann-an-duine, anns a’ chùil as bòidhche den tìr seo, beathach ainneamh. Shuas an sin, tha an solas sgrìobach a’ snaigheadh crìochan nan neul gus a bheil iad, mar chnàimh thana, soilleir leis an fhèineachd dhubharaich. Shìos an seo, tha ròs-chrann lapach na chailpig neònach de dh’àile. Tha iad gam dhèanamh, àiteigin eatorra, sùil shiùbhalach, gaol neo-dhìolta, a’ coimhead air an tìde-mhara a’ lainnir air ais, agus a’ dèanamh a cùlachaidh aidhbheil o thràighean ’s creagan-na-fèile. Agus tha an aigne air cùl na sùla, anns a’ ghaol, a’ cuimhneachadh gun teagamh gun till an tìde-mhara ’s a’ smaoineachadh, le dòchas, gun ath-ghluais an tràigheadh eile, an cùlachadh brònach de dhaoine, gus na bàighean ’s na gleanntan tìorail a lìonadh le linntean ùra ag ath-stòradh na tìre le stòras de thurchar, agus a’ tighinn, mu dheireadh thall, a-rithist thuca fhèin. Pàdraig MacAoidh

Bho Duine ann an Asainte

Seann òran. Rughan chlach. Ain- m air mapa. Mi a’ leughadh air mapa an t-ainm Blàr nam Fear Mòra. Mi a’ smaoineachadh air airbhrean nuallach, sròlan, ais-ionnsaighean, imeachdan. Nuair a ruigeas mi, chan eil ann ach deich acraichean de dh’fhearann, deich acraichean beaga de bhoglaich. Mi a’ faireachdainn gu bheil mi a’ coimhead tro thaobh ceàrr ceudna na h-aon phrosbaig tron seall mi air ais a dh’fhaicinn Chrìosta, Shomhairle, Dante – gach Fear Mòr air leth, air am meanbh-acraichean fosgailte, beag bìodach ann an cruth-tìre ceothach na h-eachdraidh. Suas on cheò: an t-àm làthaireach a’ dòmhlachadh. Laigh an là seo ro fhada, chaidil e a-staigh, gus an do snaoth clag na h-eaglaise, a’ bogadh gun chiall na thùr saillte, a’ craoladh a ghuth, a’ trostadh tro shuain na Sàbaid. ’S aignean dorcha ann an aodach dubh a’ cruinneachadh mar sheilleanan chun na cuirceige, gus mil shearbh an fhacail a phàirteachadh, gus gèilleadh a thoirt gu breitheanas cruaidh Dhè nach aithnicheadh ach air èiginn Dia mo leanabais. Deich slatan bho ataireachd na mara seinnidh iad Ris luaidhean eireachdail a bhios ag at mar a’ mhuir, ann am bogsa bàn air a thogail de chloich gus adhradh a thoirt do dh’Ùghdar gach datha ’s eadar-dhatha ’s crutha, agus naomhachd dearbh-aithne agus sruth-sholais iom-ghlanadh cèille. Tha fuaim na luaidh’ ud a’ teicheadh on bhogsa-chloiche gus àite ghabail ann an Òrdugh cumanta gach fuaim. ’S e th’ annta Bith ga foillseachadh fhèin – mar a bhios ann an cruthachadh leantainneach, gun chrìoch, de dhuilleagan, de dh’ eòin, tuinn, bhogsaichean-chloiche – agus de chreideamhan, den fhìrinn, den bhreug. Na cruthan seo, na feòil-ghabhlaichean: tha aca fhèin an dearbh-aithnean suidhichte, an naomhachd dhorch’, am fìor bhaothaireachd. Faic ciamar a nì iad leud ’s bannal de bheathaichean, dìreachd de chreutairean às an tèid, aig trì mìle slat de dh’àirde, dà fhitheach nam flanerie mosach nonchalant, a-nuas do bheul an uillt, far an òl feusgain òga bùrn tron fheusagan – no shìos, nas fhaide sìos, gu far an tèid an easgann-shùileach sgàilichte mar Chorleonach tro shluma lusach grunnd na mara. Deoch-bhiugh, nathair, cat-fiadhaich, breac-mara, gearra-bhreac, sionnach, seabhag – an liosta a’ snaigheadh tro gach cùil den chruth-thìre seo, tro gach geur-chùis ’s geur-ghluasad uisgean agus tro cheabhachdaireachd àile, fhad’s a thuiteas tughaidh, a mhìn-bhris ballaichean. ’S e an stuadh a bhàsaicheas mu dheireadh, gus am fàs clann-an-duine, anns a’ chùil as bòidhche den tìr seo, beathach ainneamh. Shuas an sin, tha an solas sgrìobach a’ snaigheadh crìochan nan neul gus a bheil iad, mar chnàimh thana, soilleir leis an fhèineachd dhubharaich. Shìos an seo, tha ròs-chrann lapach na chailpig neònach de dh’àile. Tha iad gam dhèanamh, àiteigin eatorra, sùil shiùbhalach, gaol neo-dhìolta, a’ coimhead air an tìde-mhara a’ lainnir air ais, agus a’ dèanamh a cùlachaidh aidhbheil o thràighean ’s creagan-na-fèile. Agus tha an aigne air cùl na sùla, anns a’ ghaol, a’ cuimhneachadh gun teagamh gun till an tìde-mhara ’s a’ smaoineachadh, le dòchas, gun ath-ghluais an tràigheadh eile, an cùlachadh brònach de dhaoine, gus na bàighean ’s na gleanntan tìorail a lìonadh le linntean ùra ag ath-stòradh na tìre le stòras de thurchar, agus a’ tighinn, mu dheireadh thall, a-rithist thuca fhèin.

Photograph of Canisp by Richard Hanson Northwords Now

Mandy Haggith: A passion for Assynt ‘… a visiting eye, an unrequited passion…’ Norman MacCaig, ‘A man in Assynt’

This ice-sculpted loch-and-cnocan space is still The sea’s as merciless as always, Another non-question; the most beautiful corner of the land. still practicing arpeggios on the beaches like ownership, The air prevaricates on, ready for wild jazz jabbling in the Minch, our love is shared and various the ups still lift, ragged as ever, robbed of its fish, and as unlikely to run dry the hollows still astound pulsing in and out of a harbour as the rosary of lochs, with sphagnum art and puddle-craft. he wouldn’t recognise: Urigil, Cam, Veyatie, Fewin, The tide glides out no boats tied up unloading fingered by streams, their destiny and slides back in again. catches from whisky-drinking fishermen; the gushing fervour of the Kirkaig. Tourists (though he wouldn’t use the word the bar land-locked; Yet it, too, swells and wanes not seeing himself as one) continue to come, fish market, an empty hangar; to the pulse of seasons. maybe even wearier now of our much newer civilisation: a tanker full of cage-grown salmon; the clock’s tyranny out there is strong as ever. and a row of French and Spanish freezer lorries Spring comes, Here, natural rhythms perpetuate, vacuuming up the guts of deep-sea ships. polytunnels flourish, day and night, moon and season. In Lochinver, the ancient smell of brine, rowan berries will feed seaweed and fish is laced, the fieldfares’ skirmish, His questions pointed at true north, for the time-being at least, woods regenerate where teeth and hooves desist, a compass bearing that has driven with diesel. seals feed in the fjord, men in boats and folk inland otters glide out on the rising water, on a journey he’d be proud of. Outside, it’s the old Atlantic perfume, ravens tumble and gannets plunge great westerly gusts of it, and lift Who owns this land? soft and wet and welcome and ride the sky. Loch Roe, Clachtoll, the pools in Stoer, as a grandmother’s tea. the fanks, Clashnessie Bay, They say trouble’s brewing The land lives, despite what we do, our litany of mountains - in the ocean, the great web or fail to do. Schemes start, Cul Beg, Cul Mor, Suilven, Canisp – of feeders and fed, collapsing. abort. Traditions they’re ours, the local people’s, For now though, grow and cease. crofters, women even, all who live here dolphins line-dance northwards The land lives on. who fought and won, past Sleat and Soya raised the funds to share the rights and beneath them sand-eels A tide of people ebbed to this rock-bog-wood-loch land. shoal to a deep-sea trance-beat. and turned: new generations replenish the land, coming into our own, We possess and it belongs to us The untiring tide has worked its shifts. coming in, coming in, but what he knew was that At the end of the winter the thaw is slow, to renew the unrequitable passion. we owned it all already toads keep to their secret places, and though we have the title now great-tits teach in tree-tops, its text does not express the two-way deal: woodcock blunder among birches, dodging bullets. it is also us who belong to it. We argue, of course, this is still Assynt: It remains masterless. less poaching than in his day, maybe, but no fewer devastating views. Suilven’s snow-clad, sun-drenched, an iced pudding in a bowl of cream, He watched folk waning, as delicious as it’s always been eking a subsistence from acid soils, which he called and always will be. dying acres, seeing abandoned lambing fields, Nothing we do changes the mountains, larochs, rushes, heathered lazybeds untilled, though I swear they gleamed but was it death he saw, or people the day we bought them. tiring of the struggle to yoke the land to their control? He asked if owning has anything to do with love. I answer him, everything and nothing. How do we tell if a land dies or thrives? It’s a marriage made in a solicitor’s office, Whose assessment of life or death do we believe: the deeds are silent about what matters. the March crofter who sets a match to heather Yet it was passion for this place and lets the muir burn, or the children that drove the people to rewrite its history, counting dragonflies by Loch Beannach to wrest the land from rich and absent men. on a summer afternoon? Who loves this land the best: The mountains are unaffected. the hunter coming in Lochans do not care. with a stag on the back of his quad,  or the woman heaving a basket of seawrack to her berry patch in the rowan wood?

14 Northwords Now The Poetrie O Flora Garry By W.S Milne.

lora Garry’s poetrie is owermuckle Milne. The fundamental tone, or pitch, o neglecktit. Sae it is, for exaimple, that Garry’s verse is stabilitie, a wey o livin whaur Fnane o her poems appeir in Tom Scott’s a culture deals wi experience an thocht as a The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (1970), haill an nae juist as a mairdle o pairts. In this or in Douglas Dunn’s Twentieth-Century wey her airt exists on mair than one plane at Scottish Poetry (Faber, 1992), or in Robert aince; her poems are nivver whit she caas ‘ae- Crawford and Mick Imlah’s The New Penguin fauld’, but are multiform, varyand an deep, Book of Scottish Verse (2000). This is an unlike her neebour Aal Massie wha can think unco owersicht, as Flora Garry is on a par wi o nithing but ‘wedder and baests maet.’ Thai’re Violet Jacob an Helen B. Cruickshank, some wirds, she says, that ‘fire the callest bleed,’ an of whase wark appeirs in aa three antholo- trainsform the ‘roch human carl’ in aa o us. gies. At schuil, she minds, us, the dialeck wis An wis thar iver sic a phrase-makar! ‘The regairded as doun-pittin, an ‘vulgar.’ Fechtin wide win-cairdit skies,’ ‘the black earth lies thae customed forces wis helpit bi her mither in clods,’ ‘the snaa-bree rins on the roads,’ an faither, baith writers, coaxin the dialeck ‘Feerious birlin sleet-raips,’ the ettercaps’ at hame. She tells us she wis brocht up wi ‘slivvery tangles,’ the cat’s purr’s ‘three-threids- ‘good music and lively talk, most of it in the an-a-thrum,’ an her phrasing has a proverbial Buchan dialect.’ ‘Words to us,’ she says, ‘were pouer: ‘Better a kin’ly gley gin a dirten glow- the breath of life.’ In ‘Bennygoak (The Hill er.’ Dialeck is shawn here tae be the foonda- of the Cuckoo)’ we fin her great-granfadder tion-stane o the linguistic communitie that biggin the fairm at the Mains o Auchmunziel is the Buchan, aye-abidin. For Garry, poetrie (Gaelic, she tells us, for ‘a field near the moss’), is stabilitie, the ruitedness o a wey o life, a scrapin a livin frae an itherwise ‘bare brae face,’ culture. Human knawledge an lear turn heel- heedless o human graisp: ie-gouster frae one place tae anither, alwayis changin, never still, a fack paipered ower in It wis jist a skelp o the muckle furth, oor ivermair globalised wardle. Personal iden- A sklyter o roch grun, titie gets lost in an eddy whaur local associa- Fin Granfadder’s fadder bruke it in tions are owerwhummled. The lucid, fluent, Fae the hedder an the funn. singin an exaict language o a community is Granfadder sklatit barn an byre, Brocht water to the closs, owerblawn, but nae tae a mindfu airtist like Pat fail-dykes ben the bare brae face Flora Garry: An a cairt road tull the moss. Nicht’s creepin in aboot, it’s early lowsin-time. fowks, an concentrates especiallie on femi- Ahin the laich funn dyke, licht’s hinmost lowe, nine entrapment as a theme: On the ploo’d eynriggs o the stibble park Garry hansells the Gaelic name for the hill A smaa reid cwyle, smores i the reek o the rime. A flock o teuchats gedder, cooryin doon An icy skimmerin lappers the troch mou. itsel, ‘Bennygoak,’ ainchorin the Buchan in a ‘Flit, flit, ye feel,’ says the unco bird, Atween the furrs an chunnerin i the dark; The nyaakit bourtree’s gapin for the snaa. ‘There’s finer, couthier folk Tappit heids an chilpit chudderin breists rich Celtic paist, caain her screivins, ‘Poems The day’s deen. The year’s at the deid-thraa. An kinlier country hine awaa Seekin some strab o strae or twaa-three faal in the Buchan Dialect,’ This is a fair thocht- O girss, to hap them fae the sypin caal. throuch staunce, a deliberate ack, deidicatin This is the aipenin stanza o ‘The Quine Fae the hull o Bennygoak.’ Bit ma midder’s growein aal an deen her ‘wee buikie’ as she caas it tae ‘the folk of an the Teuchats.’ The poem hews closs ti the An likes her ain fireside. Garry biggs up her hairmonies on whit New Deer village and all who live by the rhythms o the spik, wirds fu o the spirks o Twid brak her hert to leave the hull: MacDiarmid caaed ‘Earth.... the only ground Ugie and the Ythan in the “braid Buchan lan” naitur, bringin ti the dialeck a spang-new It’s brakkin mine to bide. of human hope,’ an on the thorough-bass o of North East Aberdeenshire.’ Garry is a sel- qualitie, an independence o min chaireckter- the Buchan dialeck, as Lewis Grassic Gibbon refleckin thinker miles awa frae the schuil o istic o fairmin life. Flora Garry says the fowk At the same time, she caiptures the brav- did on the spik o the Mearns, wi universal naive kailyaird lyricism some fowk wid con- o Buchan share ‘a sharp awareness of the erie, the stalwarthiness, o ummen, as in ‘War: vailues, an intelligent love o life. demn her tae. Her poetrie alwayis shines oot things of the mind, but not to the exclusion 1939-1945’: Whan she notes that ae winter the grun wi an acute intelligence. Her lines are weel- of lovable human qualities and of earthy eve- was as haird as airn, an it tuik picks tae howk dreelt and ordered, nae shammelt, and there’s ryday affairs,’ their wirds ‘brief, succinct, vivid, An Droggie’s clivver dother? She could mak her fadder’s peels. up the neeps (she’s quotin here frae a nee- nae dreichness aboot them. She vrochts at down to earth,’ revealin ‘a contemplative habit Nae hoven wyme or clocher, nae beelin, hack or strain bour’s faimilie-diary) we’re nae that far re- her wark, ‘shoodrin her load,’ clear aboot the of mind.’ Sae we hear the spring-heid o her But she could ease; an fin royt nackets tummelt greetin at their play muived frae the speerit o Herzen or Gorky’s maitter at han, nae letting her min slip frae airt waalin up frae the people tharsels an thair She’d rowe up their bleedit sair bits, sen them duncin furth again. wark – thar’s nae difference in the hairdness o The bairns likit Chrissie. Faar’s she?’ the facks afore her: leid: the life presentit. Flora Garry’ll still be heard An Cyaarnadellie’s foreman? I’ the clear Spring nichts lang eftir mair famous voices are hiv doilt There’s twaa wyes o kennin – Bit ae foreneen the win swang roun to the wast, He trystit wi the banker’s deemie up at the market place. awa. Wi yer heid, yer rizzon an muckle respec The cloods were heich an licht, Noo, she’s skycin roun the gable-eyn, her leen, i the early gloam, In her poetrie we hear the true voice o For the weel-stored-min’; The sky wis blue-er gin we’d seen’t aa Simmer. Wi a muckle cwyt aboot her an a graavit ower her face. the Buchan. She has gien us guid, faithfu Cyaarnadellie’s foreman, faar’s he?’ Wi yer finger-eyns, yer instincts an yer een, The howes firmt up. The strae began to reeshle. wark ensuring some maisure o endurance. Lear o anidder kin’. Shaef efter shaef we turnt the stooks wi wir hans ...... In tull the face o a strong sunshiny breeze. ‘Speir at the waarslin tides, the desert saans, the caal starlicht. As Sappho an Alkaios vrocht in their native Her wark has aboot it whit G. M. Young, in I’ the cornyards, the smell o the ripent grain... They ken faar.’ Melic dialeck, sae tae daes Garry in hers, anither context, has caaed ‘a passionate appre- singin, thankfullie, o ‘Creation’s mornin oor.’ hension of form,’ a deliberate vrochtness an She envisions the fairmer, ‘scythe in hand As Thomas Hardy for ain kent, great hu- Her wark mair than pruives the fack that an maiture craiftsmanship. There are nae dress- to snick the seeding thistles,’ the shooers blat- man passions are played oot on the back roads enlichtened persistence in the leid will aye ings-up then, nae fanerels or furligorums here. terin in frae the sea, the win-blawin-throuch- as weel as on the main roads o life Garry’s nae guairantee some beautie: Inheritin the best o the bothy ballads, Scots snaa, the North East’s ceaseless ‘salty gales.’ wrichtan on her ain; she kens that. She’s aye sangs an plays, an fiddle playing, Flora Garry The lan for Flora Garry is a leevin phenom- alert tae the literatur o the area, praisin the Bit the Spring o the year’ll thowe the nirlt grun, tell us she wants ‘to create beauty in sound.’ enon, nae an abstraick fanton, but she kens wark o Gavin Greig, Charles Murray, David Slocken the gizzent gowan-reet, kennle the funn, She marschalls the dialeck’s rich acoustics, en- that the taingle o the kintra disnae suit aa Kerr Cameron, Jack Webster, Jessie Kesson, An wallochy-wallochy-weet the teuchats rise richenin, deepenin the life o the wird: David Toumlin, John R. Allan, an John C. Ower the new-shaven leys. n

15 Northwords Now Poems by Theresa Muñoz & Marion McCready

Travelling Barcelona zoo The Herring Girl By Theresa Muñoz By Theresa Muñoz By Marion Mccready

holding your gaze We agree to reconvene in a few hours Under a cloud of shoals she lies. as other farewells take place because you would like the Picasso The peaty moon on the glossy floor museum, and I want the animals. rising from her knees, salt and wet cotton – Alone the afternoon stretches out. sailing the length of her curves. the smell I pay seventeen euros of leaving damp from my pockets Her herring bone hands hang by her side. * and wander with a broken sandal The cry of her oilskin tongue, at security around the drowsy creatures lost to the wind. I shrug off my jacket pull off my shoes yawning hippos Across the loch pad across the metal frame bowed flamingos the false men shimmer and jungle cats curled avoiding her face, their glitter of quartz, the woman in their wire enclosures. feldspar, hornblende. whose hands slide down my chest Only the monkeys swipe and holler. They talk amongst themselves. * Sweaty and blistered Cailleach of the moors, am I, or am I not with a crumpled zoo flyer she slits throats in her sleep. falling out of the sky I edge the perimeters Though she lies inland, the low rumbling and see you standing her body is a work of the sea. the bouncing beyond the exit’s turnstiles She follows the seasons in my seat I feel it coming, in the ports of her mind. its unkind wave chasing freed, the instant your face turns Her dreams are preserved in brine the future; where were we and spots me. as she lies waiting, when we said goodbye? waiting, waiting * for the silver darlings to arrive. The River is Playing a Guitar your hand on my back By Marion Mccready our smiles stretched the din of others around us The river is playing a guitar, A Car, Snow-sunk and minutes sliding past the guitar is green. Abandoned, Smells of You The river is strumming a song, By Marion Mccready * an elegy. The river-boys have come, nothing so difficult they’ve come for me, The horizontal pull, slow fall from firs as getting further I am the voice of the sea. lean towards the ground, my garden-cloud. further away The guitar is a fish in the hand, The trees are clothed in birds, they wait for me the landscape strung in the deep. in my snow-dress, my bare feet. from my window changes It scratches its back on my stones, feeds on my sleep. The horizontal pull, slow fall from firs, hard ice It hums in the lap of my waves, jaggy grassy tips reach through the snow. to ocean my waves are free, I am the voice of the sea. Droplets hang from branches, rows of moons; * one by one they fall, christen my hair. The sea is a muckle of sons daylight wakes me in the chord of G. The winter cherry blooms an orange glow; some place new They swim with their river-guitars, a street light in its arms. Sludge browns the road. they sink to their knees. light spills Buttercups buckle the banks The horizontal pull, slow fall from firs. over me, into the aisles in their memory, A car, snow-sunk, abandoned, smells of you. I am the voice of the sea. leaving you A candle hugs a window, the burn is hedged on my mind with ever moving drift and bramble bushes, dead.

as we descend into overwhelming brightness

16 Northwords Now Love To Somewhat Short Story by Paul Brownsey

“I don’t know why you keep coming to see confiding the information or just stating it? are photographs of eminent visitors to the Tom’s outstretched hand of earlier was a lit- me.” She almost bows as she steps back to let “They put his boots and his walking shorts Temple: Ruskin assessing its significance in tle delayed, but he still does what dogs do. them in, but that is because of her hip. The and his rucksack on him and let him go a the cultural landscape, Gladstone as if sight- Licking hands? No problem. drawl might express irritation or gratitude. few steps from his door but that’s all he can seeing were a duty of office no less demand- “Poor old Murdo,” says Tom, patting his “Because we enjoy coming to see you.” manage.” ing than maintaining peace and industry, matted head, confining “poor old” to his Martin’s tone is less suited to heartiness than “It’s nice, neighbours looking after him Queen Mary among fawning men. general decrepitude, excluding from its scope to asserting the equality of mankind in the like that,” says Tom. It’s nice, too, that the lady “And what have you been doing?” she says both the forthcoming injection and the lack face of one who, if not positively aristocratic, whose surname unites two of the great fami- as they turn the pages, enthusing, the album of people to get him up and put him to bed is, as Tom has said, aristocratish. He retreats to lies of the North East is aware of the humble on the settee between them. and prepare his meals. mere politeness: “The Temple always repays details of the lives of the folk in the villages “Much as usual.” Tom glances at Martin. “He was my husband’s dog.” another visit.” around her. “Work,” says Martin, the unamplified word “You can see why she wouldn’t want to “And here’s Murdo,” Tom cries as though She stares. “Neighbours? I thought they possibly a challenge to one who has lived look after her husband’s dog when it’s old and the details of Mrs Forbes-Innes’s life need were from the council. Social workers. Home without the need to work. sick, cleaning up dog diarrhoea after what he congratulating. He crouches, arm stretched helps. People to get him up and put him to “Except…” A glance at Martin again. did to her,” Tom will say that evening, lay- welcomingly towards the floppy mottled bed and prepare his meals - ” “Except we became Civil Partners at ing the unpolished wooden table in Myrtle mongrel making its dragging way towards the “The welfare state in action,” Martin chal- Easter,” Tom completes. “Civil Partnership. Cottage for their meal, which Mrs Forbes- door, a pause after moving front legs, a pause lenges. You know.” Innes might have shared. after moving back legs. “I could do with someone to get me up Tom adds, “Putting things on a legal foot- Wouldn’t want is kinder than doesn’t want. “He, at least, will not be here next year. and put me to bed and prepare my meals. My ing.” “And we don’t know that she is from one Time to make an appointment with the vet.” hip…” The wide mouth and the backswept “How marvellous! What fun! So sensible!” of the great families. The Forbes-Innes name “Ah!” and “Really?” they say in an inter- hair divided into two wings could make these says Mrs Forbes-Innes. “I wish I could do the was his. Maybe when he married her it was ested way as if she has told them that Historic the woes of the Duchess of Windsor. same.” like what he did second time around. Maybe Scotland has identified genuine eighteenth- “Is there anything we can do?” Tom. “No, like married people,” says Tom. she was the daily help. They were lovely century wallpaper beneath the modern stuff “Any little task?” Martin’s rimless glasses “Next-of-kin, legal. Us.” scones. And she’s named for a film star. Merle. on the walls of this granite manse, built by somehow emphasise little. She says, “So many demands. Papers. Bills. Wouldn’t live-in servants have gone by the the laird in 1782 for a kirk he then refused “My husband’s grandfather would see to All beyond me.” A picture arises briefly of sixties?” to build because the congregation would not all that was necessary. If someone needed a the pair of them putting straight the affairs of “I wouldn’t know,” Martin will say, as if accept his nephew as minister, on grounds of doctor… There was a boy in the village, he this corner of the great estates of the North that refutes Tom’s speculation. immorality. Following Mrs Forbes-Innes into drove him into Aberdeen himself and knocked East, sorting papers at the desk beneath which “But her accent isn’t servantlike. I’m sure the big untidy dog-haired sitting-room, they on the door of the professor of surgery at Murdo still maintains himself sitting, moving that photo was never there before. She put it give Murdo nice social smiles such as some Aberdeen University and said, ‘I have a boy a front leg from time to time to shift weight there deliberately, to give herself an opening people give a gay couple. outside with appendicitis. You are to operate and ease the strain. to open up about him, and when it came to it “He is sixteen,” she says as they all seat at once.’ The professor was about to sit down “No, Murdo, scones are not for dogs,” says she couldn’t. Upper-class reserve, stifling your themselves, Martin carefully at the other end to his dinner but that didn’t matter.” Tom, even though Murdo has made no move emotions, stiff upper lip.” of the settee from Tom. Her ivory linen dress Tom: “That way of, of caring for the poor to beg one. The passage of food through him “It helps, I suppose, if you’re chivvying looks too good for just being in the house, so had the personal touch, real human connec- is now futile. your tenants to their deaths in the trenches.” she must have put it on especially for their tion, not just bureaucracy and sub-section “There are loose photographs and things visit. 18(d) of the Social Care Act or whatever.” here,” she says, handing over the box as they …“But of course you came to see the “Sixteen!” they say to Murdo like adults “Provided everyone had my husband’s come to the end of the album. Temple,” she says, and of course this is acqui- congratulating a child on its exam results. grandfather’s sense of responsibility!” Here is their own letter of eight years ago. esced in. “Arthritis. Nearly blind. A growth on a The rebuke will later be admired, though …often been intrigued by it as seen from the road Like them, Murdo makes to follow her out foot that had to be removed. And there’s some first, as they drive away, Martin will say, “You below and understand from Mrs Catto at Huntly the door, rightly taking no account of the fact sort of obstruction in his insides.” can just see it, so feudal, the locals having to Tourist Office that you sometimes permit members that he has no pedigree, like the woman his “Poor old Murdo,” says Tom, but only tug their forelocks to the fucking grandfather of the public to visit it… That she has kept the former master ran off with. fondly, again stretching out a hand towards to get proper medical care.” letter could mean that when they sent her “No, Murdo.” Tom raises a forefinger to him. Safe for now in the knee enclosure of Tom will say, “Money would be no prob- flowers by way of thanks after the first visit reinforce the command. “You might fall over the desk, Murdo responds with just one feeble lem about going private for her hip. She must and she replied that they must come and see the cliff with your bad legs.” tail-thump. Yet where a lesser dog might have support the NHS on principle.” it again, she meant it (Tom’s view) and wasn’t The overgrown path, roughly stepped, rises lain and dozed, he sustains the evident strain just being polite (Martin’s). steeply in a curve through what is more field of sitting up, smiling with lolling tongue at …A familiar wooden box stands on a side- And here, beneath their letter, is something than garden, but overgrown shrubs and rose each speaker, a good host acknowledging the table by her chair but it is not opened until they haven’t seen before, a coloured snapshot bushes show that once it was rescued from conversation. she has hobbled in with tea-things. The scones of a young man in a flat cap and 1960s side- pasture. “It’s just around those Scots pines,” “Another year,” Tom adds, moving the look home-made. Can they ask her whether burns and large doleful Jacobean eyes that she says as if they were first-time visitors, conversation on from Murdo to the general she made them herself? don’t doubt their own authority. heaving herself up energetically despite her processes of life and death, which must be “This may interest you.” She produces “My husband.” limp that makes her rotate her hips at each unstoppable even here in the North East of from the box the album she shows them eve- They are silent at the breakthrough. She has step, and there it is, down on the brow of the Scotland, even though, visiting it only for an ry year, an album of cuttings and letters and never talked about him, but they know from knobbly height. Its two circular storeys of annual holiday, you can imagine it a time-free pictures relating to the Temple. Here is a post- blonde white-coated large-bosomed Corinna stubby Egyptian pillars and a roof sometimes zone where the changes that occur from year card from the National Gallery in Edinburgh with the thick glasses, who runs the shop at compared to a turban are vivid in clarifying to year merely reveal simultaneous facets of of a Nasmyth bathing the Temple in sunset Durrie and with whom they have warm an- sunshine. one timeless reality. while peasants not wearing tartan dawdle on nual chats, that he ran off with a nurse after Tom pauses to scrutinise it, head on one Martin remarks, “In seven years the estate a road beneath it amid sheep and a dog. In a going into hospital for prostate problems and side, paying tribute to the idea that each visit has tripled the rent on Myrtle Cottage.” photograph local men enlisted for World War that’s why Mrs Forbes-Innes is in the Old yields new insights, enhanced knowledge of Tom remarks, “Mr Sauchen still makes his I are crammed between the pillars on both Manse, alone. things human and divine. The backdrop is daily ascent of Durriebhar Hill. We saw him storeys, looking out in cheerfulness. She re- Something moist drags against the hand green hillside, hazy, dizzying, field upon field setting off on our way here. He waved to us. marks, as she has done before, “My husband’s that Tom rests over the side of the settee. rising above the road far below. Marvellous for ninety-three.” great-uncle went over the top with them at Murdo looks up just like a dog whose eyes “I’m not convinced it is a folly.” Martin’s “Ah, well, that is not quite true.” Is she the Somme and was killed. The heir.” Here are not milky with cataracts. His response to tone accuses someone. “It’s 1792, isn’t it? - more rr

17 Northwords Now

r or less contemporaneous with the Egyptian she says; but her words in her croaky voice Murdo, bravely ascending a slow pawing step This stunning gift raises most pressingly a Room at Cairness House by Fraserburgh, and were not quite clear, and honesty will later at a time, as Mr Sauchen might have ascended question that in previous farewells has only that is thought to have Masonic significance - compel them to admit to each other that per- Durriebhar Hill before it got too much for dared to hint at itself. They answer it un- The Magic Flute, ‘O, Isis und Osiris’, and so on haps she merely said, in a disbelieving way, him. Murdo is even observing the official dog flinchingly, of one mind, perfectly co-ordi- - so this could have had some sort of genuine “What? - About tower blocks?” thing of carrying a stick in his mouth. nated. When Martin takes her hand he puts ceremonial significance.” “I mean,” Tom continues, “even if the He drops it in front of Tom but then es- his other arm around her in a hug and kisses Tom: “Maybe the laird built a pagan tem- Temple was built just as a folly, you do won- chews the barking and springing about that her on one cheek while Tom, putting his arms ple in the grounds of the manse-that-never- der whether, like, over the years it hasn’t ac- are dog-language for “Throw it for me” and around both of them, kisses her other cheek. was to get up the noses of the highly moral quired a sort of power anyway.” sits, panting heavily, smiling as though all that They stand enfolded by her smell of old roses congregation who wouldn’t accept his choice “Yes.” No upward lift of a question-mark anyone could ask of a dog has been accom- and old books; one would have thought that of minister.” in her voice. Is she a priestess of mysteries as plished and he positively enjoys meeting such the turban on the Temple, meeting Tom’s eye She says, “A man wrote wanting to set up well as a connection of aristocratic families? challenges. beyond the rise, would have had to elongate a garden centre at the Temple but he couldn’t “I mean,” says Tom, “amidst all this…green- This seems to inaugurate their farewells, its pillars to do so from here. When they sep- get planning permission.” ness.” He is at the balustraded edge of the though they are some way from the house. arate she is smiling; whether in pleasure or The interior is disappointing. Where one forecourt, the empty road snaking below. “It’s been very nice to see you both again. amusement or forbearance they will debate might have hoped for, say, a giant statue of “I mean,” he says, what he would never say Perhaps you’ll come back next year.” later. a dog-headed deity dramatically shadowed to Martin despite their decades of intimacy, Murdo, though he will be incinerated by They hasten ahead down the path, are al- by lights floating in stone bowls carved with “on a day like today, the sun sort of getting then, associates himself with the invitation most running when they reach the gate. mysterious symbols, there is brickwork and inside everything and permeating it, when by an attempt to place both front legs up on “ ’Bye, Murdo,” Tom bellows to the out- concrete. The internal staircase between the you look out on that greenness, so deep and Tom’s thighs. He falls over and yelps. of-sight dog and his mistress as he slams the storeys is of metal, like a fire-escape out of large and intense and, like, mind-drugging, “Poor old Murdo.” Tom, crouching, strokes car door shut. West Side Story. They point out to each individual human things get, like, trivialised, comfort into Murdo as he rights himself, Driving back to Myrtle Cottage beneath other the graffiti carved into the pillars. Jas. no, seem trivial, but that doesn’t mean you frantically trying to lick Tom’s stroking hand the Temple on its height, they and their Volvo Henderson 1827 shows loving craftsmanship don’t cherish human things, you have to, be- in proof that nothing indicative of imper- are now part of the sun-goldened Nasmyth worthy of a preservation order. cause they’re part of something, but… It’s like fect dog-functioning happened. Martin, like scene. Martin says, “If there’d been planning per- Traherne: ‘There is in us a world of love to someone passing disapproving comment, says, “It was,” says Tom defiantly, as they squeeze mission in 1792 they’d have refused permis- somewhat, though we know not what in the “We wondered if you would like to have din- carefully past a car coming in the opposite sion to built the Temple.” world that should be.’ You could almost be, ner with us at Myrtle Cottage.” As if he’s gone direction, “like the Temple did something.” “And yet,” Tom replies like someone in a like, a pantheist.” too far this time he adds, “Next year.” “SF53 EGD. Did you see that?” Martin has play before an audience, which fits in with “We need to be going if we’re to get milk.” “How marvellous! What fun!” pulled off the road, scrunching into broom. the Temple, for photographs in Mrs Forbes- The sun dazzles off Martin’s glasses. “Nothing elaborate. We have quite simple “Some old bag talking on a fucking mobile Innes’s box show Shakespeare being acted “Corinna doesn’t shut until eight,” Tom meals.” Martin, warningly. ’phone on this road. SF53 EGD. You wit- here, the upper storey of pillars Juliet’s bal- protests. Nevertheless they drift away from Tom: “Just, like, fresh Don salmon and nessed it too, didn’t you? I’m reporting her cony, “things that at one point seem awful and the Temple, back up towards the Scots pines. raspberries from the garden. And a Dubonnet to the police. SF53 EGD. It’s virtually fucking hideous gradually, like, become part of the “I mean,” says Tom, defiantly, “it’s like be- in the garden first.” single-track. She could kill someone. SF53 landscape. Years from now we’ll be romanti- ing different individuals fades out, there is “Ah, Dubonnet. The last time I asked for EGD.” cising about tower blocks.” something that this little insistent pressing Dubonnet the Duchess of Buccleuch called He drives on through peasants and sheep, “And what,” says Mrs Forbes-Innes, like a demanding yelping self merges into, and even it the scraping from the floor of the vineyard. careful not to run over the dog. n grande dame in Wilde, “is a tower death doesn’t matter.” But she did say I was in good company be- block?” And here, as they round the trees and cause it was the Queen Mother’s favourite At least, that’s what they think and hope begin to descend the path to the house, is drink.”

Poems by Jim Carruth

Not missing Michael Jackson Lamentations (a village elder’s advice (i.m. Jimmy Baxter 1921-2009) on) the white crow That last winter he said prayers Three days after that other funeral in bed; listened through the rain we sat together on hard pews Why do you search to celebrate the life as one of the remaining cows for false auguries of hope? of a man who knew who he was bellowed out from its stall who worked the land from birth to death Nothing followed the triple rainbow, and put no burden on us and the others followed, or last winter’s one wild rose. to see him as anything more every beast in the shed so we were happy to sing for him Now this feathered messiah. All things bright and beautiful sending their woes to him, Can I speak plainly here: to let that be our farewell. voices he’d grown up with a white crow is still a crow; For a couple of minutes, no more, voices he’d always known a lifeless sheep is still a corpse; the minister talked of the man himself, pained journeys of sound a slow but imprecise driver a bloated corpse is still a meal whose old and battered pick up flooding his night, for your white crow. gathered dents and paint fleck a mourning beyond words scratches like postcards It still rises with its flock from all his neighbours’ farms. a choral bond flies with its flock We were there to bury a modest man, calling for the ark. simple as that, the sun streaming still falls with the black through stained glass, glory enough. on the weak and the dead.

18 Northwords Now Poems by Elisabeth M. Rimmer, Samuel Tongue, Heather Reid, Hamish Whyte & Colin Will

A Doll for Lucy - Barnacles Watching Birds The Orkney Venus By Heather Reid By Colin Will By Elizabeth M. Rimmer Running to the sea you’re forced “10,124 Pinkfoot Geese sighted at Aberlady,” to navigate the sprawl of rocks read the note on the whiteboard. It would have taken time without metal - which might, in certain lights, 10,124 eh? A big number; a lot hours, weeks, grinding the stone to part be stranded whales, of counting, and so precise. the head from the shoulders, score the lines that gave her hair, hands below wide sleeves, their grey backs draped in weed, I picture the counter’s thumb, the flow of her dress and the pins their skins crusted with barnacles swollen and tired from an excess that kept it together, like owl eyes, like breasts. as scratchy as your brother’s gallus friend of clicking, eyes blearing across when you were twelve: the grey-brown flock. “Did I count Who else would they have done it for, endowing that group? Has that goose moved?” two inches of pebble with wisdom, the thrill of stubble burn, her mother’s fertility, her father’s smile, that same hot web of hurt I can’t imagine devotion the memory of hills in her brow-line, if you should slip. on this scale. It’s enough the lochs of home in her eyes, that I recall walking except a loved child? Suddenly, your mother’s voice, in a November dusk More than a play-thing, Careful... through the buckthorn thicket, they made her a doll to keep in her pocket, foot before unseen foot a blessing of family, homeland and story along the muddy path. to keep her safe, as we would keep you. See The Ferrets Over my head By Hamish Whyte 10,124 Pinkfoot Geese babbled in the near darkness. Boy Soldier Street photographer’s snap: This glorious chorus came and went By Samuel Tongue mum, dad and me aged three in waves, as V after V with bucket and spade whiffled in to land Here’s another broken toy-soldier, holiday family at St Andrews - on the salt flats. an Action-Man stripped and scrapped, snapped memory began here in a dusty wargame, with big sand and sea I don’t read anything dumped in the Oxfam the caves I couldn’t reach into this; it’s a fact, an event on the Great Western Road, and best of all the daily walk that occurs every evening, thrown into a box with the rest of them, back from the beach at teatime witnessed or not. an embarrassed tangle past the garden where the ferrets were I’m just glad to know of skin coloured plastic, where I’d always want to stop these visitors pause here, painted-on grins for those winking somethings glimpsed their holiday home and disposable through the hedge, that never quite in the warm Scottish winter. posable limbs. finished their shapes: the movement, the strangeness. All those backyard wars and here’s where they end; Sitting in the sunny garden the returned, all these years later unreported, it’s dunnocks and robins waiting for charity, I look for hopping out from under the privet - the returned, but still hope always returning those old unfixable slivers of light to the places behind flitter at me, strain my eyes those unclosing, to catch whatever it was inked-in eyes. whatever it is.

19 Northwords Now

REVIEWS

Strong supporting characters emerge Scotland. This volume, the introduction an- along the way. In old Zetland, there’s James nounces, ‘focuses on politics in the widest Gabrielsen himself, narrator of the unfinished sense’. history of Norbie, and old Zetland generally. Many of the issues discussed by Gunn seem There are the individual Lairds, culminat- unnervingly topical: land ownership, energy ing in young Bertie Scot, ‘Ditto’, who has to production in the Highlands, the decline of make a new way in the world. By contrast, the fishing industry, the idea of a ‘professional there are the people of the remote island of theatre for Scotland’. One can only imagine Thulay (truly Ultima Thule), outlying part of his reaction to community ownership in parts the Norbie Estate, who welcome the Crofters of the Highlands today, to windfarms or py- Commission with unflinching hospitality, lons or the Scottish national theatre. while perfectly articulating the polite list of Vivid phrases add emotional power to the grievances against the system that expressed argumentative prose. Of the enforced dis- the whole plight of the peasantry: ‘There placement of Highlanders to Canada, Gunn was, in their geographical extremity, and their notes: ‘Names like Fraser or Mackenzie wan- methods of arranging their own mental map der as mighty rivers across a continent’. Or to ignore it, something of the condition of evoking Scotland’s economic ills: ‘A tour of all people’. the coast line of Scotland is a tour of scores In the new world, there’s wild and bold of derelict harbours and creeks, every one Zetlander Jake Kuliness (‘Kapiyaki’), who of which was at one time tumultuous as a lived among the cannibals and founded a healthy hive’. And in the same essay, which community, and the gentle centenarian Mimie berates the church for failure to question Jeromsen, who, thousands of miles from the contemporary values: ‘Big business, attended islands, speaks a pure form of Shetlandic and by financier and publicist, are the trinity we recounts the love story of David’s grandfather worship to-day’. in beautiful dialect. An afterword explains that the twenty-six In present-day Shetland there’s the eccen- essays – many originally appearing in The tric minister Rev. Pirie, and John and Lena, Scots Magazine – are presented thematically incomers, friends of David’s father; strange, rather than chronologically. Themes are not obsessive ‘born-agains’, living on the edge spelled out, but emerge diffusely through se- of religious ecstasy. There’s the Laird’s kind quential reading of loosely grouped pieces housekeeper Mary, and the unsettling old – some about Nationalism, others focussing shepherd, ever present, who says little but sees on issues specifically Highland, including the much. essay ‘Belief in Ourselves’ (1945), which gives The islands themselves emerge variously as the volume its title. The final essays handle lit- a utopia, a poverty trap, an importer and ex- erary matters, often Gunn’s responses to other the old world, the new world, the mysterious porter of fine minds and strong traditions – a writers of his time such as Grassic Gibbon, Da Happie Laand concept of heaven and the search for faith and troubling parallel universe and a microcosm. Muir and MacDiarmid. But themes criss- by Robert Alan Jamieson for self in the here and now. It could hardly be In the end, we all have to make peace with cross the volume, its architecture building a Luath Press more ambitious in its scope, or more poeti- ourselves. David’s search, proving wider and sense of Gunn’s persistent concerns. Review By Pam Beasant cally realised. deeper than he imagined, prompts the obser- There are frustrations: notably, it is difficult It begins simply enough, with David vation that he is ‘still a child, moving towards to trace developments in Gunn’s thinking. An It’s hard to know where to start with this nov- Cunninghame appearing on the doorstep of the unknown absence, caught in the cold sea essay first published in 1942 is followed by el, which is so wide-ranging and yet compact, the old minister, dishevelled and footsore and and the north wind, the empty lands and the one that appeared in 1931. Most are from the it takes a while to let it sink in and articulate refusing to give his name. He leaves a bundle big skies. Lost.’ late 1920s through to the 1940s, but there is the effect. It’s the product of scholarship, and of papers, and when Rev. Nicol subsequently Shetland has found its epic. This isn’t only a a scattering from the 1960s. Chronological great love. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that this realises David is an ex-parishioner whom he poetic and scholarly meditation and historical presentation would allow Gunn’s ideas to be writer, born in Shetland, with his prodigious baptised as a child, he starts to piece together account, it’s gripping and involving, beauti- seen more clearly in relation to world events ability and preoccupation with language, her- the fragments he’s been given. As his health fully paced and ultimately moving. All aspects of his lifetime – Depression, the growth of itage, sense of place and context, should have deteriorates, he works on the unfinished old of the narrative seem present, vivid, and, like Fascism, Communism, the Second World tackled these enormous subjects head-on. Zetland history, written by learned nineteenth David Cunninghame, we are drawn into an War. However, the volume’s afterword pro- What is pleasing and moving is his enormous century schoolmaster James Gabrielson, and exploration of our sense of place and history, vides useful contextualising. success. It is lifted far beyond social and his- sets in motion a correspondence with de- and – despite the precise dating of extracts This collection highlights certain facets of torical documentary by the universal human- scendants of key people in David’s story in and letters throughout - into the mysterious Gunn’s mind and writing; ideally it would be ity and emotional intelligence of the writer, New Zetland (part of New Zealand), through cyclical nature of time itself. n read alongside Landscape to Light, a compan- and the compelling central storyline. which a whole history emerges. Meanwhile, ion volume of essays focussing on landscape, The interweaving of fact, fiction and re- his personal reflections stray through the nar- spiritual and philosophical concerns. Among construction is superb and as closely knit rative – his anxiety about David, his grief at Belief in Ourselves Gunn’s achievements is his evocation of the as a Shetland fisherman’s sock. There is the loss of his wife and his shaken faith as he by Neil M. Gunn natural world; for the pleasures of that we the first-person narrative of young David confronts his own mortality. All this is beauti- Compiled by Alistair McCleery & must turn to his more meditative prose, and Cunninghame, searching for his lost father in fully and poignantly achieved. Dairmid Gunn above all, to his fiction. Shetland. Then there’s the search for David by David’s own immediate search gradually Whittles Publishing Gunn is described on the back cover as ‘one the dying minister in Perth, Archibald Nicol. unfolds, with his life-changing journey north Review By Carol Anderson of Scotland’s most distinguished and highly There’s the human history of the Lairds and to the island home he never knew, where regarded novelists of the 20th century’. That the people of Norbie in old Zetland; and his father ran to and disappeared from, and A ghostly saltire wafts across this book’s cover, reputation is not entirely secure; some crit- lastly there are the lives, adventures and de- the characters, politics and tensions of the hinting at some of the preoccupations within. ics express unease with his ideology, includ- scendants of the Shetland folk who travelled community. David is deeply affected by the The Caithness-born writer Neil M. Gunn ing gender politics (an area of thinking not to the new world and founded new commu- beauty of the landscape; its ‘otherness’ and (1891-1973) is probably best known as a pro- addressed in the present volume). Yet Gunn’s nities while guarding the old language and strange familiarity, and only gradually realises lific novelist, author of, for instance,The Silver work has devoted admirers too, both among traditions. the extent of his personal connection with it, Darlings (1941), a rich historical epic. But as ‘ordinary’ readers and scholars, for his narra- The strands are closely connected, the and confronts his relationship with his father this interesting selection of his essays shows, tive skill and the ambitious reach of novels characters related by family and place, and da through the vivid echoes of his recent pres- Gunn was fiercely engaged with the social such as Highland River (1937). Scottish litera- happie laand of the title can refer equally to ence there. and economic realities of his contemporary ture is flourishing as an academic discipline,

20 Northwords Now

REVIEWS with sophisticated discussion of Gunn, among interdependence. This poem serves as the po- themes which run through Ransford’s poetic and flying at once, he led the swans into the other writers. And this is good. We need to etic introduction to the themes and subject output. loud, urgent grace of take-off’. Throughout debate our literature. matter of the poems that come after it. Tessa Ransford’s contribution to the life the book, Crumley’s writing has the urgent But readers also need – above all we need ‘Poems written in the 1970s’ begins with of poetry in Scotland is remarkable. Among grace of the swans’ flight. – the primary texts. In order to judge Gunn’s ‘Poetry of Persons’ where repetition in the many other achievements, she was the found- Making space for wolves in Scotland, creative and intellectual output for ourselves, first lines of each stanza creates the sense in er/director of the Scottish Poetry Library Crumley believes, requires the refutation we must have the works in print. Over the which people interconnect. It is a love poem from 1984 to 1999 and set up the Callum of stereotypes of the wolf as a child-killer, years, his novels have come and (worryingly) to humanity, showing that we have most when Macdonald Memorial Award to encourage grave-robber and battlefield scavenger. These, gone from various publishers. Currently, a we let go. ‘How things happen’ is a develop- poetry pamphlet publication. It is to be hoped he argues, are less than myths, merely ‘head- few are available from Whittles, others from ment of the theme of love and uses repetition that she will continue supporting and encour- stones to the passing of an oral tradition’, in Birlinn. We need those novels, but also the to reinforce the connection between human aging poets, and poetry writing in Scotland, which the reality of wolves was not allowed short stories – and yes, the essays. We need love and nature. Love is ‘beyond analysis’, it and that we will experience more of her po- to make an appearance. He shows how the them in print. While there are interesting ex- ‘happens’ and cannot be defined. Comparing etic explorations in the years to come. n perpetuation of falsehoods about wolves has tracts from Gunn and others in an anthology a first meeting with that of two seagulls continued into the present: his critique of such as Margery Palmer McCulloch’s mag- ‘caught in a shaft of sun’ the poem develops Channel Five’s TV programmes, Mr and Mrs nificentModernism and Nationalism, individual the proposition that we are not in control, as The Last Wolf Wolf, is particularly insightful. He shows how writers deserve to be more fully represented. we imagine ourselves to be, but should em- by Jim Crumley the myths are made: he relates an anecdote And so we must be grateful to the dedicat- brace the notion that we are subject to forces Published by Birlinn of a man in Norway who woke in the night ed editors of this volume, and to independ- of nature and good can come of this. Review By Mandy Haggith to hear his dogs barking, went out naked to ent publisher Whittles, for drawing together ‘Poems written in the 1980s’ contains investigate, and heard, with delight, ‘a concert many of Gunn’s essays and making them some of the poems from the series Medusa To say that Jim Crumley would like wolves to from wolves 200 metres from his house’. But available. n Dozen. Exploring the complexities of wom- be reintroduced to Scotland is to understate this story soon grew legs and became ‘a walk- anhood through the figure of Medusa, these the case. ‘In a northern hemisphere coun- ing story’ and within 14 days it was being Not Just Moonshine: powerful poems express the female condition. try like this’, he says, ‘if the wolf is in place retold as an attack by a ‘slavering pack’ on a ‘Medusa Six’ begins: everything in nature makes sense, but in the defenceless man. If such distortion can hap- New and Selected Poems absence of wolves nothing in nature makes pen in a mere two weeks, Crumley asks, what By Tessa Ransford Self-transformation is what makes us women, sense.’ hope is there of a fair representation of wolves Luath Press our peculiarity, defining feature. This book is a passionate argument for in Scotland surviving more than 200 years? Review By Irene Hossack Watch it as girl becomes mother, wolves to be reinstated in Scotland, made I must, in parentheses, admit mea culpa as as the mother adapts to with exuberant clarity by a naturalist whose the author of a novel, The Last Bear, in which every phase of growing in her child. Tessa Ransford’s Not Just Moonshine (2008) writing is as confident as a striding wolf. Jim I portrayed wolves in such as a way that it de- collects new and selected poems written over Embracing the sometimes negative figure Crumley often cites Barry Lopez, the great liberately drew on the prejudices of our cul- the last four decades. In his Foreword to the of woman as ‘The witch, the wise woman’, American author of classics like Of Wolves and ture. I used wolves as a proxy for evil, and for volume, Michael Lister explains the decision the poem claims these characteristics as posi- Men and Arctic Dreams. At his best, he writes as that I hang my head in shame and apologise. to order the poems according to their date of tive forces, women are ‘part of the spiral of well as Lopez, and shares his uncompromising The case for bringing the wolf back to composition, rather than date of publication. creation,/its dyings and renewals.’ stand on our species’ dysfunctional relation- Scotland is perhaps less successfully made in He writes that ordering them this way allows Throughout the collection are poems that ship with the rest of the natural world. this book than the case against is decimated. the poems to refer more to Ransford’s life play with form. One formal element in par- The most entertaining chapters of the There is the argument that wolves would help than to her books. This is an interesting ap- ticular, is the use of repetition. This repetition book are those where Crumley sets about de- to control Scotland’s infestation of red deer proach, which also helps to reveal the growth can be within stanzas or through stanzas and bunking the various stories of the last wolf thereby reducing their ongoing destruction and development of Ransford’s oeuvre and her brings a sense of wholeness to the poems, re- in Scotland. He sets out to expose ‘Last Wolf of the woodland habitat in which they for- evolving poetic voice through the years. The inforcing meaning, as formal choices should. Syndrome’: the human tendency to turn an merly thrived. There are examples of Norway themes of womanhood, motherhood, love, In some poems the final word in a line is anecdote into a lasting story, embroidering it and Yellowstone, in the USA, where wolves spirituality, myth, the natural world and sense repeated in the first word of the next line. along the way to make it a ‘better’ tale, but have been reintroduced in recent years, and of place, are as much evident in the early po- ‘Waxwings in the park: variety is the spice of life’ so much so that it becomes, effectively, a lie. here in particular it would have been interest- ems as they are in those written recently. It (from ‘Poems written since the millennium’) One by one he unpicks the last wolf stories, ing to have a deeper analysis of the effect of seems inappropriate to single out certain po- is one example of this: revealing the untruths lurking within them. wolves and how much of that effect could be ems from others as the collection represents His rubbishing of the ‘pigswill’ of Victorian expected to transfer to Scottish ecosystems. a life and as such is of a whole. Overall the A flock of waxwings in the sycamore animal historian J.E.Harting is riveting, as is It would have been interesting to get some poems reflect a woman’s experience and the sycamore in February in the park the demonstration of how far and wide his sense of whether and how Crumley envisages experiences and insights of women, echoing park green and windswept in the city mythologising about ‘rabid droves’ of wolves the wolf’s missing co-predators, particularly the feminine in voice, tone and subject mat- city grey yet glistening in the east has spread. lynx and bear, in a future assemblage in an ter. The repetition brings a focus to the lan- Crumley’s own last wolf story is embedded ecologically restored Scotland. But these are The volume takes its title from a remark guage and at the same time develops rhyth- within the book as a sequence of short fic- really calls for ‘more’, rather than criticisms. made by Sir Walter Scott ‘…everything is mic evocations of landscape, though Ransford tional passages, in the style of Lopez or Farley Crumley’s argument rests, finally, not on a sci- moonshine, compared with the education is careful not to overuse this formal element. Mowat, of the last wolf living out her solitary entific case, but on the instinct that the nature of the heart’, quoted at the beginning of the Poems that explore science are informed life on Rannoch Moor and the Black Wood. of Scotland ‘makes no sense’ without wolves. book. Given that the poems are a reflection of and playful. ‘String Theory’ (from ‘Poems Some of the book’s most vivid writing is in This book is a huge breath of fresh air. Ransford’s life and explore many wide-rang- written since the millennium’) considers ‘a these passages about Scottish forest and moor- Breathe it in and be inspired that ‘a wolf place ing themes, the collection can be seen as a re- universe that’s knitted out of string’. ‘Choices land landscapes. He adores Rannoch not only does not stop being a wolf place just because ply, showing that moonshine is not insubstan- the Goldilocks Principle’ successfully plays with for its wild rawness but also for its potential the land runs out of wolves. For there is no tial or without meaning and is a worthy sub- form to consider the ‘golden mean’, a scien- as a last refuge and future reintroduction site such thing as the last wolf.’ She hasn’t been ject matter for poetry. Indeed the Foreword tific notion of extremes, and the requirement for wolves. born yet. n tells us that Ransford selected the title in defi- for things to be just right for life in our uni- No-one can write about swans like ance of the notion that looking on the moon verse to flourish: Crumley, and one of the most magical sec- is old-fashioned. This is further confirmed tions is when the fictional wolf sits out a Archie and The North Wind by the poem that sits opposite the quota- the value of the in-between: snowstorm close to a flock of these birds, by Angus Peter Campbell tion. ‘Moonlight over Arthur’s Seat’ is a poem that just-right balance knife-edge keen and ‘the snow made white ovals of swans and Luath Press in isolation, before the Acknowledgements for human equilibrium wolf’. Afterwards, the wolf gets up, shakes off Review By John Jennett and Foreword. Arthur’s Seat, a landmark of the ice crust ‘like thistledown’ and disappears Edinburgh, with the reflective light of the The poem understands the fragility and ‘into the snow-gloom’. It is her absence that I was fortunate to read Archie & the North Wind moon playing upon it, brings an exchange complexity of life for humanity and in nature, most unsettles the swans, whose leader ‘leaned whilst sailing the Hebrides in September. between nature and humanity, showing their his neck at the wind, dead straight…. running Thanks to this compelling and lyrical novel, I rr

21 Northwords Now

REVIEWS

r did not need to feel the real gales on my face remembered and told or re-told or embel- altogether different note in The Foorshow by the sights of an unfamiliar city. Simply to conjure up Angus Peter Campbell’s land- lished a thousand and one times over the at the Mad Yak Café (Red Squirrel Press – taking a stroll can involve seeing a sheep ly- scape. Instead, with the author’s storytelling years”. But these minor flaws should not dis- www.redsquirrelpress.com). ‘Sealskin’, for ing ‘Flat on its back with its throat cut… swilling in my imagination, the book peeled tract from the whole. Nor should the cover example, begins ‘I tread carefully’ and a qual- There was no expression on the face/As if back the layers of the physical and cultural design, which on the basis of straw-polls I ity of reticence, and a wariness when it comes it didn’t mind//Or as if it didn’t know any- scenery. conducted positioned this as a book for the to drawing conclusions, is evident in many more/Whether it minded or not’ (‘Morning This is the writer’s first full-length ven- teenage market. of these poems. In ‘Credo’, he even admits Walk’). The north of Scotland proves as vivid, ture into an English-language work, although Angus Peter Campbell has made a bold ‘I lack the language’. He’s talking about not if not quite so unsettling, as in this descrip- some may have sampled his memorable, and brave attempt to fuse the country’s being able to speak Tibetan but the statement tion from ‘Postcards’: ‘The lighthouse over- Calvino-inspired collection of twenty-one Gaelic traditions with a contemporary novel hints at the unfussy, unshowy way in which seeing Sandwood Bay/With its stack dagger- fables Invisible Islands (Otago, 2006). Archie is with bang-up-to-date global, environmental ‘big’ questions are addressed. Moreover, when ing at the sky/Guillemots head-butting their another vehicle for the same distinct voice: themes. By the measure of his own peers he it comes to the English language, Colin Will way/Through the waves after the fish/Puffins unashamedly rooted in the storytelling tra- is a true Bard in the fullness of the tradition surely knows a thing or two. There’s some- spattering the cliffs’. This is rich and colour- ditions of the Gael but without any self- and by the evidence of this book a true nov- thing gleefully surreal in his description of ful stuff so I feel a little churlish in saying consciousness about the magical realism of elist. Enjoy this English debut; look forward (I think) rhododendrons: ‘Bushes from the that, at times, the poems feel somewhat over- a loosely contemporary setting. Here clouds to the next work and even further refinement Himalaya/flash their pom-poms,/cheer-lead- worked. Occasionally Andrew doesn’t seem brood “like Gordon Brown” and the reader which may see the writer become as signifi- ing in shades/of pink and carmine.’ (‘Hide to put enough trust in the image and feels can expect the recounting of a waterhorse cant a voice in his second-tongue as he al- and Find’) He’s also very acute on how easily, a need to explain too much. For example legend to be interrupted by a google search. ready is in his first. n and sometimes uneasily, the pilgrim becomes the phrase ‘sunshine blares out’ is a succinct The fast-paced plot propels the eponymous a tourist and vice versa. In ‘The Iron Road and arresting piece of synaesthetic descrip- protagonist towards his zeitgeist confronta- to Lhasa’, one of several ‘Tibetan’ poems, ‘a tion. Does the reader really need to have the tion with terrorists and an oil company thou- river of red robes/and tourists’ flow around meaning ‘confirmed’ with the awkward con- sands of miles from his hebridean home. the ‘Lhasa circuits,/ as if to spin the city/like ceit of ‘visual ghetto blaster’ (‘Bosphorous’)? This see-saw between the dramatic present a prayer wheel.’ That the last five poems in Indeed, I shouldn’t have minded if Birdsong and the swirl of handed-down stories is a From The Small Presses the book conclude with the ‘untranslatable’ and Flame had contained rather fewer po- brilliant attempt at revealing the conscious- Review By Chris Powici Buddhist mantra ‘Om Mani Padme Hum’ ems and more white space, so that text and ness of Archie: an islander on what starts as suggests a poet who has set a limit on his image had more space to engage with one a simple, if surreal, quest to “stop the North It’s a sad fact of editorial life that Northwords own claims to ‘truth’. Whether he’s explor- another. Nonetheless, it is a collection with Wind”. Perhaps Campbell intends Archie to Now receives more books than we can review. ing questions of faith or describing mountain a lot of vigour in its evocation of place, and symbolise a race culturally catapulted in less Nonetheless I couldn’t let the best recent of- landscapes, this modesty, combined with a a commendable candour when it comes to than a generation from “before television” to ferings from the small poetry presses pass en- persuasively matter-of-fact diction, results in the writer’s own emotional response to the the present day. The great scholar John Lorne tirely without recognition and so have given a highly readable collection. ‘unfamiliarity’ of Turkey. Campbell often reflected on this challenge, them this wee nook in the magazine. There, The ghosts that inhabit the poems of Judith Jean Atkin shows an impressively sure writing in 1959 that it was “extraordinarily after all, more poems in heaven and earth than Taylor’s pamphlet Local Colour (Calder Wood touch when it comes to that old, but use- difficult to convey the feeling and atmos- are dreamed of in the offices of Bloodaxe and Press – www.calderwoodpress.co.uk) ful, truism ‘less is more’. The poems in The phere of a community where oral tradition... Faber & Faber! come in a variety of guises. Among others, Treeless Region (The Ravenglass Poetry Press – [is] very much alive to people who have The blurb on the cover of Morgan there are pub ghosts, country house ghosts, www.ravenglasspoetrypress.co.uk) pos- only known the modern ephemeral, rapidly Downie’s stone and sea (Calder Wood Press aristocratic ghosts, family ghosts. The voice sess a remarkable sense of economy and focus. changing world of industrial civilisation.” – www.calderwoodpress.co.uk) promises of these poems is often informal, anecdotal Her principal subjects are family life and rural Certainly this work vividly portrays the con- poems that are ‘held together by a clear spir- and entertaining but the surface humour is, communities, but we are a long way from the cept as closer to a collective consciousness: a itual feeling for people and places’. However at times, broken by something altogether cosy pastoral here. In ‘Galloward, 1925’ she framework of experience rather than simply any fears that this ‘spiritual feeling’ will result more disturbing. In, for example, ‘Disputed describes the work of a ‘country boy’ whose a quaint fireside assembly of avuncular folk in poetry of hazy religiosity are soon laid to territory’ Taylor resurrects the story of two job it is to lay out the dead. The closing lines with good memories. Campbell himself be- rest. When questions of spirit do manifest Covenanting women ‘staked and left’ on the describe how, having helped to load the cof- ing steeped in the tradition, makes it all the themselves it’s in a very physical way. For ex- salt-flats ‘to punish their faith’. This is ghost fin on the hearse, ‘he hid from the gale/and more remarkable that he has conflated it with ample, the descriptions of God in ‘the stone story as alternative history, turning the tables shambled drifts in the lee/of warm plumed a literary, English language novel. bible’ range from ‘red sandstone/the white on those who still see the deaths of these horses.’ That last line comes as a quiet, affect- At times the writing is as dazzling as calm of the sea’ to ‘the loony on the bus/leav- women as ‘lies and propaganda.’ Indeed, the ing surprise in its affirmation of life in the Marquez: take the deft confidence of the ing epiphanies/ as greeting cards’. If anything wider, more serious theme coursing quietly face of winter and death, but it does so with- opening brush strokes when Archie realised it’s the sheer proliferation of images that at through this book is how what we fondly like out resorting to mawkish sentiment or over- “that the sweet thing in his mouth was his times threatens to overwhelm the poems and to think of as ‘history’ is made up of ghost elaboration. The reader is simply left to absorb mother, and that the dark thing that hid the this, combined with the decision to steer clear stories of one kind or another. In ‘Ill-starred’ the ‘heat’ of the image. Elsewhere, Jean Atkin world from him was the inside of a drawer in of punctuation, lends stone and sea something different versions of Mary Queen of Scots are is equally insightful on the hardships of work- which he slept...” Elsewhere there is a rawness of a relentless tone as thoughts and descrip- explored, every one as real or unreal as the ing the land - and the compensations. Nature in the meandering, creative flow of the prose. tions tumble across and down the page. But other: ‘Two visibly different death-masks/are is portrayed not as a spectacular, sublime Campbell has done well not to smooth off then one has the sense that Downie wants said to be yours…There are pictures/of your ‘other’, but as a familiar presence, not always the corners that both energise the work and this to be an intense sort of book. More often pale face wherever we look’. That the poem easy to live with, but a necessary and gener- hitch it to the traditions. than not when revelation arrives, it arrives at is addressed to Mary herself only adds to the ous presence all the same. ‘What Happens at Occasionally in the labyrinthine nesting of the crossroads of history and memory, nature sum of ghosts. It is as if the poet is a sort of Night’ is a fine example of how poignantly recounted stories I sensed the confidence of and community. In ‘the gospel ship’ the voices medium or, rather more alarmingly, as if the Atkin articulates this sense of belonging, her the new voice faltering as the author ambi- of crofters ‘rise out across/white sands/crofts dead Queen has summoned the poem. By diction as clear and clean as a newly whetted tiously wrestled the flow of his native think- thatched/with smoke/out over the/empty the end of Local Colour I had a strange sense scythe. The poem ends ing into the modern novel. Littering the text lazybeds…singing/god’s voice/upon the wa- of how much we demand from our ghosts, with graphic icons to telegraph switches from ters’. Elsewhere, work itself takes on a spiritual whether we acknowledge them or not. From this hill the lochans float upward one narrative voice to another is a distract- dimension. For the eponymous subject of ‘the The back cover of James Andrew’s Birdsong Into dusk. There’s no wind. ing crutch that this talented writer does not weaver’, ‘her prayer/ is a yarn/chant.’ I confess and Flame (Kite Modern Poetry – 16, Fane Radar floods the sky. I still get need. It would have done him and his read- to being nonplussed as to why the lines have Close, Stamford, PE9 1HG) declares that it To breathe thin smells of fleece and milk. ers a service for his Editor to tell him so and to be quite so short (more flow, less staccato is ‘lavishly illustrated throughout’, and indeed The Treeless Region is a small book but a to bury some of the obviously authorial “ex- please!) but the images themselves are strik- it is, with some terrific drawings of animals, fine one. What impresses is not just the skill planations” that occasionally surface. Does ing. In the end it is this openness to the world people and places by Ishbel Macdonald. The of the poet but the integrity she shows in the reader need to be told that “...it was, of about him that makes Downie’s exploration poetry too exhibits a strong visual sense. The putting her craft at the service of a world that course, a different version of the story, but this of the inner life so engaging. many poems set in Turkey register the ambiv- includes but is, ultimately, wider than her- is the one Archie remembered, or thought he Colin Will strikes an alence of the stranger, attracted and disturbed self. n 22 Northwords Now

CONTRIBUTOR’S BIOGRAPHIES

Carol Anderson previously taught Scottish currently working with Orkney artist Laura Alasdair Macrae is a retired lecturer who and also broadcast on radio 4. More at Literature at Glasgow University and reviewed Drever on a sequence of poems and drawings taught with Norman MacCaig at The Univer- www.soutarwriters.co.uk/heatherreid/ books for The Herald. She now writes fiction, about non-migrant birds. sity of Stirling. His study of MacCaig’s poetry, and teaches with the Open University. simply entitled Norman MacCaig, is published Elizabeth Rimmer has lived in Stirling since Mandy Henderson, originally from Perth, has by Northcote House. 1982. Her first collection of poems, Wherever Pam Beasant writes poetry, fiction and non- lived in Ullapool for 23 years. She is a visual We Live Now, will be published by Red Squir- fiction. She lives in Stromness, Orkney, and artist and works in the local Primary school Richie McCaffery is part Geordie, part rel in 2011. was the first George Mackay Brown Writing with children who have special needs. Sassenach and part honorary Scot, holding Fellow in 2007. an MLitt in Scottish Literature from Stirling Jim Taylor lives in Shetland. He has had short Irene Hossack’s poems have been published University. He has poems in Stand, Magma and stories in Chapman, New Writing Scotland, West Paul Brownsey has been a newspaper jour- internationally over the last decade and she is Envoi. Coast, Rebel Inc and Edinburgh Review and New nalist and a philosophy lecturer at Glasgow currently working on her first collection. She Shetlander. University. He lives in Bearsden. Stories by him took her doctorate on the poetry of Geoffrey Marion McCready lives in Dunoon, a small have appeared in about 40 magazines. Hill, and teaches creative writing at the Open town on the Clyde. Calder Wood Press will be Samuel Tongue is currently working on University. publishing a pamphlet of her poems early next a PhD on poetic retellings of Jacob and the Jim Carruth’s first poetry collection, Bovine year. Angel at Glasgow University. A title is still not Pastoral, published in 2004 was runner up in John Jennett is a graduate of Glasgow Uni- forthcoming! the Callum MacDonald memorial award. The versity’s Creative Writing program and winner W.S Milne is an Aberdeen poet living in follow up High Auchensale was one of the Her- of the 2010 Sceptre Prize. His current work Surrey. His books of poems include Twa-Three Colin Will is a poet and publisher. He lives in ald books of the year in 2006. For more about is inspired by the landscape and culture of the Lines and Sangs o Luve and Pairtan. He has Dunbar. His fifth collection, The Floor Show At Jim go to www.jimcarruth.co.uk Hebrides. Further details at www.johnjen- published a critical monograph on the poetry the Mad Yak Café, was published by Red Squir- nett.com of Geoffrey Hill, and has recently made a pro- rel in 2010. Rob Ewing has been published in various gramme on The Waste Land with Joan Bakewell places including New Writing Scotland, New Norman MacCaig was born in Edinburgh in for BBC Radio 4. Hamish Whyte’s latest collection is A Bird in Writing UK, Chapman, and Northwords Now. His 1910. His father was an Edinburgh chemist and the Hand (Shoestring). He runs Mariscat Press poetry was shortlisted for the William Soutar his mother hailed from the island of Scalpay. By Theresa Muñoz was born in Vancouver and and is an Honorary Research Fellow, Scottish Writing Prize. He’s currently writing a novel the time of his death in 1996, Norman Mac- now lives in Edinburgh. Her work has ap- Literature Department, Glasgow University set in the Scottish Highlands. Caig was widely regarded as one of the finest peared in Poetry Scotland, The Red Wheelbarrow, Scottish poets of the twentieth century. Canadian Literature, New Writing Scotland and Mandy Haggith lives in Assynt and writes in many others. She is currently writing a doc- a shed with a tree-top view. In 2009, her novel Pàdraig MacAoidh / Peter Mackay has a toral thesis on the work of Tom Leonard at The Last Bear won the Robin Jenkins Literary pamphlet - ‘From another island’ - out with Glasgow University. Prize for environmental writing. Clutag Press. He has lectured at Trinity College Dublin and Queen’s Belfast, and now works Heather Reid lives in Perthshire. Her poems Lesley Harrison lives in Orkney. She is for the BBC. and short stories have been widely published

Where to find a FREE Northwords Now Postscript Northwords thanks all the locations below for their support in distributing Northwords Now. Especial thanks go to all the librarians who put us on display. Scottish Pen

Inverness Islands, West & North East Lothian Libraries W H Smith, High St. Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Slèite, Isle of Skye Ewart Libraries, Dumfries Costa Coffee, Waterstone’s, Eastgate Centre Café Arriba, Portree, Skye Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries Blythswood Bookmark, Academy St. Portree Learning Centre Byre Theatre, St Andrews inda Cracknell (see page 5) has been Eden Court Theatre An Lanntair, Kenneth St, Stornoway The Forest Bookstore, Selkirk in touch to ask Northwords Now to Leakeys Bookshop, Church St Western Isles Libraries, Stornoway Lhelp spread the word about Scottish Inverness College, Longman Road & Midmills Hebridean Jewellery & Bookshop, Stornoway Pen. We’re more than happy to oblige. Hootananny, Church St The Islands Book Trust, Isle of Lewis Edinburgh Scottish PEN is part of International PEN, Visit Scotland, Castle Wynd Shetland Libraries Blackwells Bookshop, South Bridge a dynamic worldwide association of writers Inverness Museum & Art Gallery Orkney Libraries Scottish Poetry Library, Crichtons Close pledged to protect freedom of expression and Waterstone’s, Eastgate Centre Shetland Arts Trust, Lerwick Bongo Club, Holyrood Rd. promote literature across frontiers throughout Oxfam Bookshop, Raeburn Place the world. Elephant House Café, George IV Bridge PENning Water, the latest edition of Pen’s Highland Area Aberdeenshire The Village, S. Fort Street, Leith online magazine for writers in Scotland takes Highland Libraries & Communiity Centres Aberdeenshire Libraries Filmhouse, Lothian Road a journey through watery celebrations, trans- Dornoch Bookshop Aberdeen City Libraries The Forest, Bristo Place formations, memories and fears in poetry Highland Folk Museums: Kingussie & Books & Beans, Belmont St, Abdn. and prose. The featured writer this issue is Newtonmore The Lemon Tree, West North St, Abdn. Aminatta Forna, a novelist born in Scotland The Nairn Bookshop, High St, Nairn Blackwell’s, Old Aberdeen Glasgow and raised in West Africa . In ‘Love Stories’, Findhorn Foundation, by Forres Woodend Barn, Banchory Centre for Contemporary Arts, Sauchiehall St, she tells what has impassioned creative writ- Moray Libraries Yeadons of Banchory Glasgow ers as Sierra Leone recovers from war.’ North Highland College, Thurso Milton Studio, Milton of Crathes Mitchell Library, North St. For the full literary-aquatic experience go The Ceilidh Place, Ullapool Newton Dee Café, Bieldside Òran Mòr, Great Western Road to: www.scottishpen.org/new-writing. Ullapool Bookshop, Quay St. The Piping Centre, McPhater St. Not only will you discover some fine writing Loch Croispol Bookshop, Balnakeil, Durness Caledonia Books, Gt. Western Rd from, among others, Scottish, Zimbabwean, Achins Bookshop, Lochinver South Tchai Ovna Teahouses, Otago Lane Sri Lankan and Syrian writers, there’s also Village Green, Lochinver Diehard Books, Callander Oxfam Books, Byres Road & Victoria Rd. news of forthcoming PEN events in Scotland. Swanson Gallery, Thurso Library Dundee Contemporary Arts, Nethergate, Dundee Mono, King’s Court, King St, Glasgow The web site is also a mine of information Cornerstone, Gairloch Kesley’s Bookshop, Haddington, East Lothian Gallery of Modern Art, Royal Exchange Sq. on PEN’s work in campaigning for writers Solas Gallery, Gairloch Midlothian Council Libraries Glasgow Film Theatre, Videodrome, Rose St. wherever the shadows of imprisonment and Stirling Libraries exile fall. n

23 READERSHIP SURVEY

At Northwords Now we’re keen to find out what you think about the magazine and to make it as easy we can for you to get hold of a copy. Please take a few moments to answer the following questions. Then simply tear this page from the magazine and return the questionnaire by placing it in a standard letter-sized envelope. Address the envelope to: Freepost RSKT-ZTJJ-XXHU, Northwords Now, Freepost, Dunblane, FK15 5BP. There is no need to affix a stamp. Alternatively, you may complete the survey online by visiting our website: www.northwordsnow.co.uk

How often do you read Northwords theatre or gallery) focus of Northwords Now? 36-55 Now? Home delivery (approximate cost £6 per There should be a greater emphasis 55+ Regularly year) on writing from or about the Highlands & Islands Where is your usual home address? Occasionally Other (please state) More space should be given to writing Please insert the first part of your First Time ______outwith the Highlands & Islands postcode (this information will not be used to contact you). The current mix is about right. Where do you usually obtain your paper How often have you visited the copy of Northwords Now? Northwords Now website? ______Are you a Gaelic speaker/reader? Library or Bookshop Frequently Fluent Please use this space to make any From another reader Occasionally Some Gaelic comments about the magazine which Other (please state) First Time aren’t covered by the above questions. No Gaelic ______Would you prefer to read a paper or ______What is your opinion of the amount of I have not come across a paper copy of online version of Northwords Now? ______Northwords Now Gaelic content of Issue 16 Northwords Paper Now? ______Have you experienced difficulties in Online Too much ______obtaining a paper copy of the magazine? No preference Too little ______Never About right ______How well does Issue 16 of Northwords Sometimes Now mix fiction, poetry and articles/ ______Are you female or male? Often reviews? I have not tried to obtain a paper copy of Female The mix is about right If you would like to receive notification Northwords Now Male I’d like to see more poetry of when new issues of Northwords Now are available online, as well as other How would you prefer to obtain a paper I’d like to see more fiction Please indicate your age. copy of Northwords Now? news about the magazine, please give I’d like to see more articles and reviews Under 18 details of your e-mail address. At a local library 18-35 At a local bookshop or arts venue (e.g. How do you feel about the geographical ______

Like the new “Northwords Now” website?

Elegant, quick-loading, easy to navigate and find what you’re looking for.

As an author, your online presence and ability to constantly communicate with your target audience is of paramount importance.

Whether you already have a website or are just “thinking” about having one, call me now and find out how I can help you to make the most of your online presence!

Situated centrally in the Highlands, we have years of experience of designing and building websites, databases, mobile applications and e-commerce systems for many different industries. We have designed and built sites which you are probably already very familiar with.

Sites can be tailor-made to suit ALL budgets so please contact us today! Call Tony Ross on 07549 049736 or email [email protected] for a fast response.

http://www.rosssoftwaresolutions.com