Alasdair Paterson published a collection of poetry in the 1980s – The Floating World – but almost twenty five years were to pass before his next collection was published by Shearsman.  He worked, in the intervening years, as an academic librarian, travelled extensively and raised a family.  Retirement has proved prolific for this Exeter-based, Scottish poet: Words of Mercury is the seventh collection (and fourth for Shearsman) that he has published since 2010.

The collection is made up of four sections – the third of these, ‘Urals’, is an ‘abecedary’ of ‘lost Russian novels’, pointing perhaps, along with Paterson’s penchant for the ‘list’ poem in previous collections, to a librarian-like sensibility. The joke is in the formalities implied by the title, the sequence itself is driven along by Paterson’s slightly off-beat sense of humour.

‘H’, for example, begins:

 

‘Has anyone mentioned snow in the last hour?’

The first two lines of ‘U’:

‘Ugh was how she summarised her first fifty years

Under the noses of the secret police, suspect poetry was afoot …’

And the final line of the sequence:

‘Zurich: surely he was no threat there?’   (p.43-47)

 

This section is preceded by ‘Nature Boy’, which the blurb describes as ‘gnarly nature notes’. The poems here, such as ‘Crows’, ‘Oak’, ‘Hare’ and ‘Pigeons’, riff skewedly on their subjects, usually brought down to earth by Paterson’s gently self-deprecating humour. ‘Salt’ ends on ‘Grandfather’:

‘His final words: life’s like that, children, a labyrinth of waves, a tangle of islands, a monster breathing in front and behind. This of course from the man who, in his life, had never actually left land.’    (p.39)

Many of the poems in this section take the form of haibun – a section of prose followed by a one-line haiku. Among these, ‘Anemone’ is particularly effective and affecting. The prose begins with the recalled comments of a counsellor who ‘likes his metaphors’ and states that while ‘loss is permanent’ there will eventually be ‘good and cheering things, like new petals.’ The scene shifts to his garden where the narrator is looking at anemones:

 

‘They were our special flowers. They’re blooming now. But what I still see in each centre, no matter how prettily framed by purple or pink, is a profound blackness. Early days, I guess.’

And the final line:

‘Her eyes, opening for the last time’   (p.35)

 

The imagery of each section is skilfully linked, culminating with the final line whose action both enacts the ‘opening petals’, encompasses the shared memories, and acknowledges too the ‘permanent loss’. Paterson’s deprecatory humour is present even here, but gently done (‘Early days, I guess’), adding further to the pathos of this nicely worked poem.

While Paterson is a poet who has always enjoyed his rambling sequences, his lists and riffs – see for example ‘He do the truth in different voices’ in the fourth section – I found myself much more convinced by Words of Mercury’s quieter poems. Many of these are found in the first section of the collection, ‘Somewhat in the dark’, which deals mainly with Paterson’s childhood memories. ‘Lochend’, for example, ends:

 

When daylight goes it’s time for home

On the way Mum asks what did I think.

I say her friend was nice and the biscuits

were nice and I liked the old lady too.

 

This seems to be a wrong answer.

The friend’s mother had not long since

died. I still try not to think about it.        (p13)

 

‘Memory game’ opens in ‘1950, bomb sites and coal fires; / and Granny’s doing it again …’  What this granny is doing is mixing up words, reading ‘nasty wall’ instead of ‘nasty well’ . This leads the narrator to a contemplation of language, of its workings, of how ‘… some words sit closer than / they look: like taxi/hearse, engines idling, / big and black, just a heartbeat apart.’ This in turn leads to a consideration of the unreliability of memory, in particular childhood memories, as for ‘a year or two’, the narrator states, he believed ‘Granny / put down our book and took a taxi / to her own funeral.’ At the end of the poem the humour is downplayed and, again, the poem is all the more effective for it:

 

Now I wonder: was it really nasty wall

all the time? I’ll never know, but

grannies and words and memories:

you’d put nothing past them.       (p.12)

 

A few pages further into the collection we have ‘Another Granny’. Again, memory is dubious. When ‘… Father reports / his mother is very likely / not long for this world / and we’re away West to see her’ the narrator recalls finding this ‘Surprising news, considering / I’d thought she was dead / and had been all my life… / I maybe suspected this was just / another thing I should have known / if I’d been paying attention.’ The deadpan humour here is just right in this poem that lightly considers ideas of the unreliability of memory brought up by the first granny poem. Surely, when he considers the demeanour of this granny – ‘She’s what – weary, wary …?’ Paterson is referring back to ‘Memory game’ where ‘… I’d learn what a difference / a single letter makes in the world …’ It’s a nice touch, among many such in this volume.

The collection’s acknowledgements inform us that some of the pieces here first appeared in publications such as The Haibun Journal and Failed Haiku. Paterson’s interest in haiku seems relevant to the technique of a poem such as ‘Jaundice, October 1947’ and its combination of imagery, such as in the third stanza here:

 

Down the road

sunflower husks clung to

next year’s colour promise

and austere kitchens shone

with the idea of lemons.            (p.11)

 

In the best of his poems, Paterson combines a contemplative, melancholic tone with a deadpan sense of humour. When these tendencies align, the result is very effective and touching poetry.

 

Gardenstown by Martin Malone and Bryan Angus, and published by Broken Sleep Books, moves the location further North. Gardenstown, the place, is a village on the coast in North-East Scotland, Martin Malone in his preface to the collection, cites George Mackay Brown on the village: ‘being built on four or five levels from the cliff top to the sea edge’, resulting in a vertical village and ‘one of the strangest places in Scotland’.  Malone’s short preface provides useful terms under which the collection can be read. He notes the ‘daily wonders’ of the place but also points to the village’s physical situation (built, as it is, into the side of a cliff) and how this enhances the contemporary reality of a ‘fragile ecosystem hanging on in the face of a climate catastrophe.’  He writes that ‘Great disasters tend to creep up on us in the smaller details of our daily lives …’. From the get-go then, we can take Gardenstown to be an eco-poem in the way that every properly attentive poem that deals with the natural world is an eco-poem.  Malone tells us that he moved to Gardenstown in 2017, and the preface is dated December 2021. So, while written during the covid-19 pandemic, Martin Malone makes the nice distinction that ‘Gardenstown is not a ‘pandemic poem’ but that nevertheless the sequence’s ‘prolonged act of looking was, to a large extent, facilitated by lockdown in the bay.’

Before starting into the poem, most reader’s images of Gardenstown will be informed by Bryan Angus’s illustrations, linocuts which work in conjunction with Malone’s poetry, and which are integral to the collection. Angus’s calm, unpeopled, images of the village reflect onto the poetry, each poem draws us back to the image, and by doing their work in tandem they keep us reading and reflecting at the right speed – slowly. The poems focus most of their attention on the physical place itself, though they do make space for the occasional brief description of some of the village’s inhabitants. The linocuts present us with entirely unpeopled views but which still give the sense of habitation: we are drawn to a lighted window, a lit streetlamp, or are left with the sense that a shadow is about to fall across a seemingly empty street.

Gardenstown begins with ‘Nocture / Aubade’ and proceeds to take us through the village, and through the seasons, by means of a lyrical, alliterative language, freighted with simile and metaphor:

 

Listen closely and you will hear

the hollow pock of pebbles

under the draw of backwash,

as the swell smooths out its folds

on Gardenstown beach

and time pauses upon

the lone comma of a seal snout

punctuating the night’s rucked

canvas.…           (p.15)

 

While in ‘Autumn’:

 

Dawn fruits a fat white moon

hung low above St. John’s

as the bay blooms its trawlers

about their business of squid

and the year’s last flourishings

of mackerel. Teatime’s a spindrift

of baltering bairns home from Bracoden,

while sunset is kestrel-feathered,

hovering its greys and marigold

out above the banks of Law Hill.        (p.31)

 

This needed to be quoted at some length to catch the cumulative effect of a language that uses a straightforward vocabulary, but that, on another level, is not an easy read: read too quickly and the point (about slowness, about attention) is missed. It is hard to get this wrong, as the poem slows us down to its pace; in large part it manages this through the density of imagery and numerous sound effects that it employs.  It’s inevitable that there are instances when this will be overdone (the ‘baltering bairns’ might have stayed well away, or at least not have come from ‘Bracoden’, for instance), but more usually this reader was happy to be persuaded to hang around a bit longer over a line or image.  Moving from the particular to a more panoramic view Martin Malone displays an easy and beguiling lyricism. ‘Summer’ at one point, has the narrator survey the entire town from a distance:

 

From here, we look back

across the sand to morning,

where the topple-down score

of our sad little town ad-libs

its wistful jazz to the sea …       (p.25)

 

Bryan Angus’s illustration of the town on the preceding page shows us how these lyrical few lines are rooted in precise observation, with the buildings against the cliff arranged like a musical score, random notes across a wonky stave.

Gardenstown is about looking – about giving detailed attention to the visual and sensory reality of a place  –  but it is also about attention to time.  As Malone suggested at the outset, the collection doesn’t concern itself with the covid pandemic in any thematic way, but its focus on precise moments and immediate surroundings, seems fundamentally informed by those times. In ‘Summer’ he writes:

 

The moment is its own country

slipping past thought, or what

passes for thought, towards

this quantum of Summer;

can no more be touched

than the sky’s endless blue

yet is real somehow, somehow

meets its own need to find

equivalence in these rocks

and us and now …                       (p.23)

 

This collection brims with exact and effective imagery. ‘Autumn’ gives us: ‘October ends / in a swag of blue netting and boats / craned from the harbour to sit out / the squalls of a filsket sea …’  Further on, but not much further (you don’t have to go too far in Gardenstown to come on a good image) Malone describes the debris along the beach, including ‘… hanks of tangle, / and the lone rubber glove put ashore / beside the innards, feather-and-bone / of a decommissioned gull.’ Malone and Angus have succeeded not just in looking deeply into a place and portraying its tones and nuances, but also in producing a collection whose poems and images guide the reader towards paying a similar type of deep attention.