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Every so often I come across a book of poems that is
irresistible for the absolute 'rightness' of its project; a book that has
that unerring quality of integrity, craft and communication with the reader;
a book that's doing something slightly out of the ordinary, but wearing that
difference in an unostentatious manner. This was that book for me. A delight.
Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn set off on a journey around Scotland, in the
footsteps of the Japanese poet Basho (1644-1694) and his companion Sora. In
the late Seventeenth Century, Basho and Sora travelled through northern
Honshu, the main Japanese island and, as a result of their travels, wrote a
short book Oku-no-hosomichi, which is
divided into 'stations' by location. Finlay and Cockburn repeated a version
of the journey in Scotland, visiting 53 'stations' and, at each one writing,
sharing and libating a tea and a whiskey.
There's a lovely sense of place and pilgrimage and ritual in all of this, and
as such the book relates to a tradition of literary collaborations and
journeys that includes Basho and Sora, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Auden and
Isherwood, and others. It is also, of course, a part of that very long and
honourable tradition of writing and walking. Finlay's and Cockburn's project
has also been recorded (available for a free download through iTunes, and
exists as part of the Scottish Poetry Library archive and the touring
exhibition Walk On (2013-14).
The poems of the road north are
mostly written in a spare, transparent style, that talks back to Basho and
the Japanese tradition of haiku and tanka, but also evokes more modern voices
- I kept thinking of Robert Creeley, Ric Caddell, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Thomas
A. Clark and other poets in that late modernist vein. The vocabulary of
Finlay and Cockburn's poems is also, of course, rich in local dialect:
fankle, crottle, lochan and other such words, as well as the poetry of place
names: Glenkinchie, Tullibardine, Bruichladdich. Language shapes landscape,
just as actions do.
Place is evoked through local people, their industry, local names, animals,
birds and plants. A woman called Sonia is found planting apples in her
orchard:
she's added a
millennial
scattering of
natives
to the old
commercials
small stunted
malus
with nairy a
petal to shed
Forfar
Early Julyan
Lass o'Gowrie
The Blody
Ploughman
White
Paradise
The list of the old local varieties not only evokes a litany or prayer, but
embodies, even re-materialises, the history of language and place. This
historicising and populating of place continues in clear, simple and resonant
images such as 'the dark crotch of wood' nestled in a landscape, or:
the green glen
is an
upturned bell
Cast between
Meall Tarsuinn
and Dun Mor,
with the
great Stone its clapper
or lines like: 'the heads and half moons / of copper coins / feeling silent
hopes / in the wishing tree', which records the custom of passers-by
hammering coins into the bark of way-marking trees.
This tradition of landscape 'leavings' is reflected in the poets themselves
leaving Tanzaku poem labels -
derived from the Japanese for the strips of paper on which poems were written,
and which has come to mean 'poem' - dotted around the landscape, in acts of
place-specific writing:
I wind a few
words
round the
stalks
of plaited
bog-grasses
[...]
to be found
and undone
whether from
love
or disliking
or left for
the sun
and rain
to seasonally
fade them
What is refreshing here is how the tanzaku resist the more 'appropriative' aspects of much
nature/landscape writing - they are the exact opposite of the national flag
planted on the virgin beach, the mountain peak, the moon; they are a form of
self-effacement, which is repeated in lines later in the book: 'another day
to finger poems / for the tide to read / and erase', which replaces all the
negative ego-clenching of literary personality with a refreshing humility.
I also very much admired the simplicity of a sequence of poems that ask
questions in the form of 'What is a...?'
a
cup-&-ring marked rock is
a monolithic
map
of we know
not what
a megalithic
board-game
whose rules
are lost
a petrified
ripple
('What
is a cup-&-ring marked rock?')
Asking 'What is the sea?', the
poets find 'if the sea knew what / it was it wouldn't / keep
coming back' and, in 'What is a hut?', 'a hut is four thin walls / nailed around a stove'. The form
finds inventive, list-like responses in 'What is a mountain?': 'a mountain is the crazy river's reason', 'a
mountain is identified by its thumbprint of contour lines' and 'a mountain is
where even the scouring glaciers had to admit defeat'. These are inobtrusive yet strange and
estranging ways of looking,
achieving their effects unostentatiously yet with resonant surprises.
In all of these poems, the writers use language to think in, through, with and about
landscape, its features, its history and
its inhabitants, often repopulating and rebuilding that history:
so close your
eyes
and cover the
wall-
tops with
eaves
adding the
bustle that flickers
round a big
fire.
In poems like these, times and people, and places elide, reconnecting the
reader with other times, other people and places, reminding that what
connects us is our humanity, the stories that we tell, and that observing,
and witnessing, and paying attention to where and how we live, to the world's
other inhabitants - how we all dwell
here, momentarily - is of great
importance and nourishment.
There's a great sense of unity in the writing of the poems, and one is most
times unsure of which poet has written which poem, or to what degree the
poems are collaborative. I like that blurring and effacement of the ego. It
feels like a genuinely shared experience, and that rubs off on the reading
experience too. There are a
couple of poems which identify the author 'Alec's path to St Medan's Cave...'
and 'Ken's path to St Medan's cave...', for example, or 'Alec's Epilogue' and
'Ken's Epilogue', but these poems come right at the end of the book; a very wise place to put them - it
means that, for the most part, the reader can focus on the poetry, rather
than the poet. The book ends with that Epilogue of Ken's, a wonderful
summation of the 'findings' of the journey:
finding a
hill
that's fine
in sunshine
or wrapped in
mist
finding a
chocolate
so good
you only eat
a little
finding an
answer
so wrong
you rewrite
the question
finding a
coat
that fits so
well
you long for
winter
[...]
finding a
life
that fulfils
you
and a death
too
Did I say I really loved reading this book, for the clarity of its poetry,
the directness and astuteness of its observations, the warmth of its
findings? I'm going to keep taking The Road North. I thoroughly recommend that you do too.
© Andy Brown
2015
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