sheenaghpugh | Entries tagged with jim mainland

Review of Almarks: Radical Poetry from Shetland, ed. Jim Mainland & Mark Ryan Smith, pub. Culture Matters 2020

Off Skyros at midnight
The heads of the little drowned children
Gently knock against the hulls of the yachts. (Stuart Hannay)

This is an anthology of radical poems from living poets in Shetland, which at once raises the question of “what’s radical?” Jim Mainland’s introductory essay indicates that he takes it to refer both to subject matter and style. This essay is a joy in itself; I shall treasure his demolition of the buzzword “virtue-signalling” - “surely the most linguistically flat-footed of insults – imagine Shakespeare coming up with something as weak as ‘take that, you virtue-signaller!’”.

It’s arguable that writing in dialect rather than “standard” English is itself radical, and not including a glossary of dialect forms even more so. There are several poems in Shetlandic, and I found them accessible enough, but then I’ve been around the dialect for a while now. If you can follow Ola Swanson’s high-energy polemic on the locally controversial topic of windfarms, “Da Carbon Payback Kid’s Ill-wind Phantasmagoria”, you’ll be fine:

We tak in Windhoose, Flugga, an spend da night under dis baby,
da crazed Shelthead telt me, an du widna want ta dae it too often.
On migrations it’s a big bird windfeast
o waarblers an laverick tongues in aspic
an see whin a raingoose hits it’s lik instant pâté, min.

A wind-sooked inta-gridpooer guy gae me da wikiphysics
but I already hed a lingerin o it fae da Bridders Grimm.
Da whole rig set up a vibe an drave you gibberin ta money.

One thing that comes over as “radical” from this lively piece is how dialect can be employed on the most contemporary of themes, rather than being the preserve of folk song and nature poems. Laureen Johnson, in “March-past at Arromanches”, written after the 50^th anniversary of D-Day (how time does fly), uses the dialect’s homeliness to cut through the pomp and ceremony:

But oh, in every waddered face
you see da eyes o boys.

And Beth Fullerton, harking back to a time when standard English was enforced in schools, feels an instant rapport with the poem “I Lost My Talk” by First Nations poet Rita Joe in Ottawa’s Museum of Nations. It’s possible that those whose native dialect is standard English will not appreciate fully the radicalism of “Tongue”, but Welsh, Scottish and Irish readers should have no bother:

You tried to tak my midder tongue
bit sho wis always dere
waitin
beyond da riv
o your horizon

Among the non-dialect poems, Raman Mundair’s “Let’s talk about a job” is memorable both for its subject matter (a job advert for an under-qualified, compliant doctor to work at an immigration detention facility in Louisiana) and its form, which is an unclassifiable but powerful melange of poetry, prose and drama. It’s also hard to quote from, because it uses a lot of repetition to build up a huge head of quiet but boiling anger. Its understated, matter-of-fact language is the antithesis of the ranting sometimes associated with “radical” poetry and far more effective. I would love to see it performed.

There’s only one poem by co-editor Jim Mainland, which is modest of him but a pity, I think, because he is in many ways one of the most radical writers in Shetland and any anthology of contemporary radical Shetland poems that doesn’t include his poem “Prestidigitator” has a serious lack. There are also several images (I think mainly abstract paintings though some might be photos) by Michael Peterson, including the cover image reproduced here.

Declaration of interest: there are also three of mine here, but as usual I decided it was reasonable to review the rest of the anthology.

This being an anthology, the quality, as always, is variable. There are some pieces I like less than those above, and all readers will find that so – nor will the poems they like necessarily be the ones I like. But they should all find a lively, thought-provoking body of work from a great variety of artists. One radical aspect of this anthology is its inclusiveness: we have as many female writers as male, including a trans female writer, and though BAME voices are thin on the ground in Shetland, the most striking piece in the anthology is from an Indian-born Shetlander, Raman Mundair. An almark, by the way, is a sheep that habitually breaks bounds. It’s a good word.

Jim Mainland's pamphlet titles are always an interesting indicator of what he is up to. A Package of Measures alluded both to government measures and the various verse forms he was using, while League of Notions, (reviewed here) again associated his political themes with the exuberance and fancy of his language and imagery.

"Fuglicaavie" is an Old Norse portmanteau word meaning, more or less, a blizzard of birds, originally coined by Shetland fishermen to describe the cloud of birds that follows a fishing boat coming in with its catch. The poem with this title is a shape-poem representing the said boat, and the picture – both the boat and the cloud of following birds – is made up of words from the Shetlandic dialect of Norn, the language spoken in the islands until a few centuries ago but now lost as a language, though many words survive in dialect. Anyone who doesn't get the point of shape-poems should have a look at this one and see how moving is the image of the cloud of lost words following the boat home; if there is a way this could have been as powerfully expressed without using a pictorial image, it isn't obvious to me.

But as one of the quotes used as an epigraph points out, the word caavie can apply to anything, which is why we also have the grim poem "Styrocaavie", about the pernicious microbeads of polystyrene, deceptively resembling snow, with which we are busy polluting "our" environment:

falling as friendly precipitation

in the beauty of clog and glom and chronic
fallout beside take-away residual hill and shore
headaches falling into the interstices and sleeving
for the central nervous symptoms whose falling

systems take hundreds of years to decompose whose
few known methods of breaking down cannot
be simulated

As can be seen, the language here becomes, in a different way from the words in "Fuglicaavie", itself a caavie, a blizzard of words not necessarily falling in what we may think of as the "right" order. And the randomness, the breakdown of ordered syntax, immeasurably heightens the anguish of the tone. Mainland is a poet living in a remote rural place; it would be a huge mistake to suppose him, on that account, apolitical or unaware of contemporary concerns, particularly environmental ones. Bidisha, chairing this year's Forward Prize panel, said snidely and superficially "A poet is not an old white heterosexual male philanderer talking about what he saw on his walk". Leaving out the "philanderer", this would actually be a fair description of Mr Mainland and his methods, but you see, madam, it rather depends how sharply one observes on one's walk and how one's talent transmutes observation into language.

As readers of his earlier work will know, Mainland often collaborates with musicians and some of his poems do have musical accompaniments which I've heard performed. When I was wondering how on earth the poem "Fuglicaavie" could be performed for an audience, it did strike me as possible, given a projector and soundtrack, so that the words could move across the screen, while several disembodied voices spoke them in random combinations. It would be unconventional, but then it is rare to find a poet to whom both shape and music are so important.

There are more conventionally constructed poems too in this collection – even a long poem in terza rima (""The Water Diviner"). But the measured cadences of "The Carpenter", celebrating Francesco Tuccio, who made the Lampedusa Cross from shipwreck wood in memory of drowned refugees, hold the same anguish and power as the caavie poems:

After the sea of children's cries, and worse,
the flooded, capsizing, submerged silence,
a slow dystopian interrogation
of lost papers and sifted identities

The poet conjures up a possible motivation for so hazardous a journey:

a dream
you once had, where you walked among strangers,
were freely enfolded in their welcome;
a gesture whose simple shape your fingers
now trace and retrace clasp and unclasp:
a tree out-branched, upright on the level plain,
a raised hand to haul you from hostile waters.

This pamphlet is £6 inc, p & p and is probably the best £6 you've ever spent if you are interested in what innovative and aware poetry can do, whatever the age, ethnicity and inclination of whoever writes it. The author is doing the distribution: he can be contacted at Rockville, Nibon, Hamar, Shetland, ZE2 9RQ. Or if you're lucky enough to live near Lerwick, you can find it in the Shetland Times bookshop.

I had the pleasure of doing this interview with Jim Mainland some time ago and he let me quote some poems, mostly from his collection A Package of Measures. It's been far too long since then but now we have a pamphlet, called The League of Notions (as you will have noticed, Mr Mainland has a gift for titles). It is published by Hansel Co-Operative Press, which promotes literary works relating to Shetland and Orkney, in a limited edition of 300.

One of the poems I quoted in the interview was "Performance", which is a version in the Shetlandic dialect of Les Murray's poem of that name. This appears in the present collection, along with some more Shetlandic versions: a passage from Paradise Lost and poems by Holub, Tranströmer and Murray, again. The version of Tranströmer's "April and Silence" (original here) is a good illustration of what the dialect can change and add. In the standard English translation of the original, the first verse goes

Spring lies deserted.
The dark velvet ditch
creeps by my side
not reflecting anything.

Mainland's version:

Da Voar is by wi, forlegen.
Da saft dark stank
oags alang be me side,
aa licht lang slockit.

Now some of this is straight translation, though "velvet" becomes "saft", presumably for the richness of the three varying "a" vowels in "saft dark stank" (a stank is a ditch). But the last line, "all light long since quenched" is a departure from "not reflecting anything" that very much localises the poem. A "slockit licht" was an extinguished oil-lamp, and the fiddle-tune "Da Slockit Licht", composed by the Shetland musician Tom Anderson, recorded the depopulation of Anderson's native area, the Eshaness peninsula, made obvious by the lack of lights in abandoned houses. Mainland lives in Nibon, not too far from Eshaness, an area similarly beautiful and sparsely populated. This re-creation inevitably invests the line with a vast, rueful and very particular nostalgia.

Several of the original poems are elegiac. A dead person's voice is briefly heard in a "scatter of notes", or perhaps not, "I think I hear this, but I'm not certain" ("Presence"). In "Outsourcing", the lost voice is imagined communicating in ways that vary from the traditional, "smoke signal/or talking drum" to far more contemporary ones like "a rusty pumping/of borrowed beats and bungee dub heart" whose soundtrack is a "ribby vibraphone". Mainland, who collaborates with musicians in his work, has a keen love of the music of words, and the poem "The Chestnut-eared Bunting feat. The Bobolink meet the Rockers Uptown" - whose title is slightly less baffling when you realise it relates to the influx of off-course migrant birds that hits Shetland in autumn – is an exuberant tour-de-force of language whose vibrancy echoes in sound the visual extravaganza of the birds:

This is what the green wind bashes out
or bullyblows in – an irruption by Dali

out of Gogol by Hazzard County:
strident fire between the eyestripes,

Lucifer and Freudian, quiffed and
spliffed, coxcombed and crested,

with glamrock iridescent dusting
and the starling's I-speak-in-tongues app.

Mainland is rooted in a place, as is evident from his poem "Da Field Placings", a shape- poem set out as a map of place-names ranging from the descriptive (Deepdale, The Slithers) through the intriguingly odd (Troubleton, Rumblings) to ones like Tiptoby whose story can't even be guessed at. But he is also very aware of a wider world from which his lexis and imagery come just as much as from more traditional sources. Though one could trace influences, he does not really sound like anyone else currently writing (and I have just read, by way of judging a national competition, a year's worth of collections many of which did sound quite alike). I still want another full-length collection from him, but in the meantime, this is very welcome.