Contemporary Poetry (1950–) Attila Dósa and Michelle Macleod
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
CHAPTER NINE Contemporary Poetry (1950–) Attila Dósa and Michelle Macleod While Scottish Modernism has been described as ‘inter-national’ in the previous chapter, a progressively self-confdent transnationalism alongside a self-refexive hybridisation of the speech forms and cultures of home has characterised poetry since the war. Dialogic engagement with diferent literatures and languages within and outwith Scotland identifes a number of poets from Edwin Morgan to Kathleen Jamie, whose works investigate man as both a socially determined individual and a spiritual being independent of political borders: Matt McGuire and Colin Nicholson, in fact, refer to a sense of freedom in contemporary Scottish poetry.1 The literary and linguistic intersections can be traced out with the help of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a ‘minor literature’ – ‘not the literature of a minor language but the literature a minority makes in a major language’ 2 – which, striving to fnd a voice in an idiom at once familiar and strange, operates in the twofold paradigm of deterritorial- isation and political commitment in order to construct a literature that holds collective value. The second wave of the Scottish Renaissance is barely more than a label of convenience, which embraces a clutch of divergent talents coming into maturity in the 1950s. This includes Norman MacCaig (1910–1996), whose Riding Lights (1955) presents philosophical contem- plations of lucid and compact images from North-West Highland farm life, as in ‘Summer Farm’: ‘I lie, not thinking, in the cool, sof grass, / Afraid of where a thought might take me’. Looking back, the closest equivalent to these metaphysical poems may be found in William Drummond’s medieval Scots poems, though neither is their strange negativity too far from Edwin Muir’s near-contemporary existentialist mind-set. Looking forward, poems like ‘Smuggler’ and ‘Patriot’ reveal a lyric integrity combined with humane pacifsm which Douglas Dunn later takes as his own. MacCaig’s ancestry comes from the island of 83 84 attila dósa and michelle macleod Harris on his mother’s side and his ‘spiritual fulcrum’ can be found in Assynt.3 But he is also a poet of Edinburgh, where he enjoyed the companionship of other writers prominent in the 1950s, including Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915–1975), Tom Scott (1918–1995), Sorley MacLean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain) (1911–1996) and Robert Garioch (1909–1981). And though not a native Gaelic speaker and always suspicious of politics (he was a conscientious objector during the war), he records a tragic observation of diminishing ancestral Gaelic culture, as in ‘Loch Sionoscaig’: ‘Yet clear the footprint in the puddle sand / That slowly flled / And rounded out and smoothed and disappeared’. Greenock-born W. S. Graham (1918–1986) also looks at philosophical problems of perception (through language rather than image) in ‘Seven Letters’ (The Nightfshing, 1955): ‘The great verbs of the sea / Come down on us in a roar. / What shall I answer for?’. Graham’s scrutiny of how language is encouraged to take on meaning looks ahead (partly via his friend Edwin Morgan’s work) to the interest of a 1990s cluster of then-young poets, called Informationists. The handling of the past, the position of the ‘I’ perceiving itself while perceiving the ‘non-I’, and the long dramatic monologues with a foreign infection (in Malcolm Mooney’s Land, 1970) may be an unacknowledged and as yet unexplored micro-line of continuity between Graham and Frank Kuppner (1951–). Muir’s disciple and later friend George Mackay Brown (1921–1996) came from Orkney and returned to live there. In Loaves and Fishes (1959) and Fishermen with Ploughs (1971) his negotiations of identity and tem- porality depend on exploiting timeless symbols of pagan and Christian rituals in an ambition to resist progress, ‘a rootless utilitarian faith, without beauty or mystery’.4 He describes quotidian details of fshing and farming life in a language that is contemporary, minimalist, and archaic, biblical, at the same time. Both the thematic and the formal concerns in Brown’s epic attempt to confront inevitable modernity in the name of organic communities beyond the northernmost shores of Britain difer from those of prolifc English-Gaelic poet Iain Crichton Smith (Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn) (1928– 1996). Brought up on the Isle of Lewis, he looks at historical-economic exploitations of the land and its people in ‘The Clearances’ or ‘Shall Gaelic Die?’. But he as ofen speaks about less pleasing aspects of living on geographical, linguistic and cultural peripheries (in ‘The Law and the Grace’) as he is being nostalgic about the decline of Gaeldom: ‘sometimes I hear graves singing / their Gaelic song to the dingos’.5 His existence on the boundary leaves him searching for meaning because in spite of contemporary poetry (1950–) 85 his efort in ‘A’ dol dhachaigh’ (‘Going Home’),6 it is impossible for him to feel settled and at peace. Throughout the last century there has been a continued weakening of Gaelic culture: traditional communities have changed and have less clearly defned borders, with Gaelic being spoken almost as much in the Central Belt as it is in its heartland Highland and island areas. The resulting hybridisation of culture is deliberated upon by a number of Gaelic poets of this era: for some this represents loss, while for others it is an indication of the procurement of Gaelic as badge of whole- Scottish identity. Of the Gaelic poets of the period under consideration here, George Campbell Hay (Deòrsa Caimbeul Hay) (1915–1984) posits that Scotland is better of for having two cultures, yet this proposition is made as if it is a controversial one, as in ‘Ceithir Gaothan na h-Albann’ (‘The Four Winds of Scotland’): ‘is i Alba nan Gall ’s nan Gàidheal is gaire, is blàths, is beatha dhomh’ (‘it is Scotland, Highland and Lowland, that is laughter and warmth and life for me’). Any perceived challenge in this sentiment at the time of writing is now gone, as evidenced by its inclusion on the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament. If this proposition was controversial in the frst half of the twentieth century, it becomes less so, perhaps, especially with the increased number of non-native Gaelic speakers writing in the language. Such writers include Meg Bateman (1959–), Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh (1948–), Christopher Whyte (1952–), Rody Gorman (1960–) and Niall O’Gallagher (1981–). Their presence in the literary landscape challenges the old order: currently there is very little poetry being written by native speakers under the age of sixty. As the youngest of those mentioned here, O’Gallagher is part of a society where there is now a well-developed Gaelic network where second-language speakers are able to use the language of their choice with relative frequency and with acceptance: he concedes that while his language choice might be puzzling to some, for him it is an instrument of communication which best suits his ‘new’ craf as poet.7 So confdent is he in his linguistic choice that he rejects the common practice of publishing with facing translations. Whyte has said that for him the practice of self-translation is without pleasure or value and ‘almost a question of voiding the poem of its content, which may, indeed, be the language in which it was written’.8 Neither O’Gallagher or Whyte labour over their right to compose in Gaelic, neither do they spend time considering the state of the language; however, Whyte does concede, in the envoi to the wonderfully crafed long poem ‘Bho Leabhar-Latha Maria 86 attila dósa and michelle macleod Malibran’ (‘From the Diary of Maria Malibran’) (frst published in 1996), that ‘Gaelic’ poetry readers might prefer to read about things more ‘Gaelic’, such as abandoned crofing tools and waning traditions. Throughout the verse of this era the issue of identity is one which is repeatedly addressed by Gaelic poets, especially so by Derick Thomson (Ruaraidh MacThòmais) (1921–2012), one of the most prolifc modern Gaelic poets, whose output spanned more than half a century and included seven volumes and one collected works. In his earlier works Gaelic language and culture is shown as suppressed, for example in ‘Anns a’ Bhalbh Mhadainn’ (literally ‘In the Mute Morning’, but in his own translation ‘Sheep’),9 where the sheep smothered in the snowdrif are representative of the oppressed Gaelic language and culture. MacThòmais does not restrict himself to talking in general terms about how the lin- guistic and cultural situation is changing. He has a number of poems which show how becoming part of greater Scottish (and intellectual) society afected him: he agonises over how he is at times torn between two cultures and two languages. His fnal collection clearly shows a second stage to this denouement of hybridisation. For him the process has changed Gaelic culture and language too much: and while hybridisation may assist in keeping Gaelic language alive, it is a language that is very far removed from the one that he grew up with and one that holds little appeal for him. Silke Stroh discusses the ‘colonising and de-colonising implications’ of ‘the increasing proportion of participants in Gaelic culture who come from non-Gaelic backgrounds’.10 Referencing Glaser’s anthropological- linguistic work,11 Stroh notes that this can be liberating in that it shows people are freer to shape their own identities, but she also notes that ‘where hybrid identities veer too strongly towards the anglophone/non- Gaelic side, or too strongly towards the temporary or merely symbolic, there is a danger that Gaelicness will be reduced to the equivalent of a hobby or interest group’.12 This is clearly expressed in MacThòmais’s ‘Dh’falbh siud is thàinig seo’ (‘That went and this came’), which refers to the linguistically superior Gaelic rooted in community and history (MacThòmais uses the word ‘dualchas’, roughly ‘heritage’ in English, but very emotively loaded) which is then replaced by the inauthentic Gaelic on road-signs and in translated school texts and on television.