Just when it seems I've not seen much new poetry this year, it all comes at once. Some failure of the poetry bush telegraph left me the less informed but eventually I found out about this and there's a couple more to come.Stuart Paterson's Saving Graces was an excellent debut in the 1990's after which it went quiet but he's back now and making up for lost time.
Not much has changed, and we can be grateful for that. These are poems rooted in time and place, the title referring us to his return to Scotland after years in, I think, mainly Manchester. They are direct, uncomplicated meditations on home, local history, nature and some politics, free of the sort of linguistic showmanship and adventure to be expected in the Roddy Lumsden book just arrived. In some amateur poets such sincerity and unlayered poems can become mundane or sentimental but Stuart is never that, his themes accumulating to an authenticity and truth that make for richness in an entirely convincing collection. His sense of place is full of the people, past and present, that made it,
Loves were made to last, fused through the brick
& woven into smoky floor and thatch,
and the details of several obscure figures from the history of Galloway, often C18th, are provided in a number of footnotes.
The nationalism that Stuart began with, when his poem, Dream State, gave its name to an anthology, hasn't abated. Personally, I don't see political independance being necessary in making identity and countries seem to me better off in alliances than in isolation but politics is not the primary purpose of poetry. Although it is a natural place for the discontents.
Looking for Wullie reminds me of my own search for Rosemary Tonks as Stuart tries to find the grave of Wullie McClellan, blacksmith, whose photograph shows him at work,
lost in
what it means to live but not forget.
And Sketched, on the page opposite, is a similar thing, with
Grace wedged into the very essence of
geology, herself a poem, a sketch
still being drawn not by word or line
but by the steady expert hand of time.
That closing on a rhyme in otherwise usually unrhymed poems is a regular feature in poems held together by phrasing and rhythm. It is effective and undemonstrative, never in danger of being accused of being prose set out in lines but neither allowing itself to be forced into unnecessary disciplines.
My Last Word on Herons is acute in its observation and depiction; Margaret Wilson's Abjuration is as powerful as anything with its conflation of political and religious dissent, gender perspective and life denied; Not Summer Yet describes the contingency of unseasonable weather.
The book, so specific about events and characters, is about timelessness, though. It is always extending beyond circumstances to something wider, the grander scale of things not by any means accepted as right or proper but understood, and impressively set down. It would be difficult for anyone, whether a regular reader of poetry or not, not to enjoy it at whatever page they open it.
It's great to see him back in such consistent good form.