sheenaghpugh | Review of Veeve by Christine De Luca, pub. Mariscat Press 2021 (Reply)

This is a collection of 45 poems (46 if you count both the dialect and standard English versions of the title poem), of which about two-thirds are in the Shetlandic dialect. There are footnote glossaries on the pages with the dialect poems, though I could have wished these notes were in bolder type and not quite so crowded up together. There doesn’t usually seem to be any particular reason why a poem is in Shetlandic or standard English, not that there needs to be, but in the two-part “Stumbling on ghosts”, she uses the two dialects to point up both the differences and similarities in the situation of Kaya, a Turkish village deserted as a result of war and ethnic differences, and a similarly empty agricultural landscape in Shetland – this may now be deserted for many reasons, including sheep clearances and modernisation, but the religious passions that killed Kaya are mercifully absent here:

      dey wirna
     a theological fag-paeper ta discern atween
     tree harvest-homs, tree reformed kirks.

Some poems will always have a personal appeal to particular readers, and for me, a teenager in the 60s, “Very heaven” had a special resonance. It isn’t easy to evoke the spirit of an era – Ian McEwan, for instance, tries to do it by piling up random details that don’t really add up to much – but here De Luca really captures the excitement and energy which that time had for young people even so far from London and Liverpool as Lerwick.

     We were all
    “going steady”, bonding like penguins after
     a spell at sea. And the café was suitably baltic.
     Every surface was unrelenting: concrete stair,
     formica tables, linoleum on the floor.

I suppose someone being particularly fussy might object that the Baltic and penguins are a long way apart, but the humour worked and those hard surfaces were very reminiscent.

She is very good at evoking places too, often with telling imagery. Anyone who has seen a mussel farm in a sea inlet will appreciate the pinpoint accuracy of her description in “Hinny-spot”:

black pearls laid alang da slim neck
o Stromness Voe.

Many have commented on the positivity and celebratory nature of her poetry. This can be a difficult thing to pull off, for there is a danger of sounding either too chirpily optimistic or homiletic. These poems are in no way Pollyannaish, but they do now and then sound as if they have designs on the reader: one can see the poem fixing on some object, event or image and proceeding determinedly and inevitably to, if not quite a moral, at least a sort of life-lesson. The title poem, with its image of the snow globe, feels a bit like that. I can buy the comparison of a depressed person’s “inner world lacking peace” to a stirred-up snow globe, but while it is obvious that the snow globe will settle down and become clear again, the poem does not, to me, give any reason why the person’s “inner world” should also become “vivid and crystal clear”. It feels a bit like saying “it’ll all come right in the end”, which we know is far from always the case.

Often, though, the celebratory note is welcome, especially to those who feel poetry sometimes overdoes the misery. In “Soondscapes”, a chapel is “wheeshtit” (silenced), but a new sound has replaced its music:

twa windmills spin new soondscapes owre
da laand, kert-wheelin alleluias.

Windfarms are currently a controversial topic in Shetland and not every reader will hear their sound like that. But her last line: “Up owre da hill, airms turn, da haert lifts” uses its rhythms so skilfully to shape mood that it would be hard not to feel that lift.

This review was first published in The New Shetlander.