sheenaghpugh | Review of Poèmes Écossais by Paul Malgrati, pub. Blue Diode Press 2022 (Reply)

a newfound lingua franca —the common tongue of our possible land.

So Paul Malgrati, in a foreword, describes the exhilarating mash-up of Scots and French (with a few other languages periodically surfacing) in which he has written this dynamic first collection. He feels obliged to add, possibly in anticipation of criticism, “The following poems were written in Scots by a native French speaker. They are not an attempt at Scottish mimicry. Nor do they belong to any recognisable kind of Scottish patois.” Any such criticism would be both mean-minded and misdirected, for what we have here is an idiolect, the voice found by a man who was born into one culture and has adopted another. It never sounds forced or affected; what it does sound is massively energetic, a language continually straining at the leash and urging both writer and reader on. In “Tae ma Dundonian jo” he articulates the personal circumstance that helped to bring about this happy fusion:

        je t’adore mair nor the drums o Montmartre
       wi upbeats o brangles an beaten barricades;
       je t’adore mair nor a dram o sunkiss,
       when the Law Hill skyres, uprisen at tea time;

         je t’adore mair nor the Covenant within,
        that uplifts oor mystère an maks siccar the lift;
        je t’adore mair nor la mia patria,
        fir a countra was born in the tryst o oor hames

It isn’t just two languages that come together but two histories and sets of cultural references, as when “Rousseau bumped intae Hume” (“Forêt de Montmorency”), or when in “Champs-Elysées”, a failed revolt bumps into a sell-out Union:

      Ah! ça ira!’—t’was whit they said
      the last risin o Misérables
     agin the rotten rottans’ rale,
     —yon scunn’rin crew—
      that’d sell awa Marianne
      fir Darien shares.

Or when, in “Drount Cathedral”, inspired by a Debussy prelude, he exports “La Cathédrale Engloutie” to Scotland…

   in the cranreuch o yer bairnheid,
   when yer maw grinned at ye thro the haar,
   ayont the firth an the tangible moor,
   there, yonder, in the parlour,
   where elders shivered o ayebidin wae,

Times collide and mash too, in the long poem “Siege o Dundee, c, 1651”, where a brutal Cromwellian sack somehow synchronises with modern times so that a contemporary street busker with mental health issues morphs into a timeless chorus to the action, and the rebuilding afterwards ends up as the kind of reconstruction that followed quite another war:

   “Wheesht!” they say —“Hearken tae the Provost’s plan:
  a Brutalist, Le Corbusist, béton-
  holic, Kumaian, criss-crossit, bald
  33 square-gane, car-pairked, bingo-
  perkit conurbation!” —“Hear! Hear! A toast,
  braw gentleloons! Gie’s a tart o concrete!”

And I suspect the same conflating of times in “Leith Harbour”, where the ostensible speaker is Mary Stuart returning to her birthplace from the France where she had grown up, but in which one can surely also hear the voice of the emigrant poet:

     Let me luve ye like hame, will ye? new land that’s grown wild
    intae me wi sharp, ill-manly bliss an staunch, hard,
    yet delichtfu howps that godly virr rove here.

   Are ye mine, unco patrie?

It should by now be clear that this is a poet completely unafraid to do what he pleases with language, and I wish it were possible to quote online from “Mapamound”, which is basically a land/word/scape that periodically breaks up into different contours or streams. Unfortunately I can’t reproduce the formatting. When he wants to, however, he can also execute conventional formal poems perfectly, as in the sonnet “Wallace o Arc”. Although he doesn’t say so, I am sure he is here writing about the Kelpies of Falkirk, that statue of the fey horses which tempt people to ride on them, but you mustn’t, for they will head unstoppably for water and drown you (We have them in Shetland too, but since our mythology is more Nordic, we call them njuggles).

    At stake, in war-cried noons o quarters past,
   they lure ma watch wi watergaw-bewasht
   ambuish. Their huifs, aloof, entice the route
   tae auld Orleans — yon drawbrig their moustached
   satyr o maidenheid cuid force — an Ah
   wad fain find them an ride alang, were Ah
   nae feart tae hug their schiltron o horns.
   Ah’ll bide here, syne, an let their beauty gang.

   See —they rise up yet, wi eldritch panache.
   Fantoush pastiche, their sonsie miracle
   relichtens faith in ma patrol. Ah’ll bide
   alert, ma watch awauken, nae fir faes
   but ferlies queer; the likes Ah’d kill
   tae keep in sicht, fir they’re the kythe o grace.

Reading a poet who uses language so freely and inventively is a bit like riding a kelpie: exhilarating in the extreme, though hopefully not ending in a loch. I have not found a new collection, or a new poet, so exciting in a while.