Posts By: Richie McCaffery
Review: ‘Wain: LGBT Reimaginings of Scottish Folklore’ by Rachel Plummer
Scottish literature of the 20th century particularly is well-known for its humanism and pluralism. You just need to think of the likes of folklorist and poet Hamish Henderson, himself a bisexual man, arguing that poetry and song could help heal divided communities and societies. His most famous song ‘The Freedom Come All Ye’ is an…
Richie McCaffery
Review: ‘The Gaelic Garden of the Dead’ by MacGillivray
Each new MacGillivray collection should be welcomed for its far-out linguistic verve, spiky music and intellectual dynamism. There are few poets writing today as utterly sui generis in their style – like poets of the British Poetry Revival (and I’m thinking particularly of Barry MacSweeney and his Book of Demons) all we can do as…
Richie McCaffery
Review: ‘As Slow As Possible’ by Kit Fan
Kit Fan’s multifarious second collection takes its title from an art installation / piece of music for a church organ by John Cage which began its performance in September 2001 and is scheduled to end, believe it or not, in 2640. It takes on average over a year for a note in Cage’s composition to…
Richie McCaffery
Review: ‘A Watchful Astronomy’ by Paul Deaton
The title of Paul Deaton’s powerful first full collection, A Watchful Astronomy, might strike the reader initially as something of a tautology – surely all astronomy is about keeping a vigilant eye trained on the night sky? Deaton’s approach is to look down the other end of the telescope at the minutiae of our earthly…
Richie McCaffery
Review: ‘Landfill’ by John Wedgwood Clarke
We think that once we throw something away it vanishes, and John Wedgwood Clarke’s poems play with that notion and show us how mistaken we are. Reading Landfill, Wedgwood Clarke’s latest collection and the product of a year spent as poet-in-residence at two refuse centres near York and Scarborough, I was struck by something inspiring…
Richie McCaffery
Review: ‘The Mains’ by Patrick Davidson Roberts
The Mains (Vanguard Editions) is a long, dark night of the soul and is not the place for studied scenes of domestic strife or costive little elegies. The reader coming to these poems for the first time might well be thrown by them; their aesthetic is jagged, frantic, and elliptical. One thing to bear in mind is that…
Richie McCaffery
‘The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx’ by Tara Bergin
It’s perhaps a sad indictment of the way in which history is recorded that many potential readers of this, Bergin’s second collection, might not have heard of the lamentable story of Karl Marx’s youngest daughter Eleanor (1855-1898). The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx seems to step into the breach and breathe new, memorable ways into…
Richie McCaffery
Review: ‘All the Prayers in the House’ by Miriam Nash
All the Prayers in the House opens with a short and incantatory poem called ‘Vesper’ that shrouds the collection in mystery before it has even really begun. In its broadest sense, it means ‘evening’, but it could also apply to the candlelit evening prayers of the Presbyterian Church. This in itself conjures up the predominant faith…
Richie McCaffery
Review: ‘At Hajj’ by Amaan Hyder
Centred on the Greater Pilgrimage to Mecca – from which At Hajj (Penned in the Margins) derives its title – this collection abounds with interrupted narratives or side-lined stories from seldom heard-of, or listened-to, people. I’ve been busy thinking about the layout of a new collection as I read Amaan Hyder’s fascinating first collection that mingles…
Richie McCaffery
Review – ‘Landlocked: New and Selected Poems from Zimbabwe’ by John Eppel
Many of the poems in Landlocked (smith|doorstop) act like an individual’s ‘truth and reconciliation’ commission applied to Zimbabwean people, politics and a natural landscape playing the reluctant stage to violence and bloodshed. The poet’s job in Landlocked is the bring up the bodies to the surface. Landlocked is my first encounter with the poems of the…
Richie McCaffery
Review: ‘Moon For Sale’ by Richard Price
Moon for Sale does not pander to, or patronise, its reader and often reading the poems you become aware you are in the presence of a mind working much more quickly and sharply than your own. If, like me, vast swathes of your reading diet consists of fairly orthodox lyrical poetry, then it might serve…
Richie McCaffery
Review: ‘The Met Office Advises Caution’ by Rebecca Watts
Reading Rebecca Watts’ first collection, I’m reminded of a phrase by D. M. Black who, talking about the Scottish poet Robert Garioch, advised readers to be careful in approaching his work, because beneath the quiet exterior ‘passions burn’. The same can be said of Watts’ initially disarming and unassuming poems that soon give way to…
Richie McCaffery
Review: ‘Dirt’ by William Letford
Billy Letford’s first collection Bevel found the poet grappling with graft, family and home and in his keenly anticipated follow-up Dirt, he keeps these themes close to heart while venturing further afield, never ‘feart’ to get his hands dirty. There is the staple poetry you would expect from Letford here: elegy, anger and memory. But…
Richie McCaffery
Scotland small? A Century of Scottish Poetry
Buried in one of Hugh MacDiarmid’s long, later poems (‘Direadh’) is a clear passage that strikes the reader like an angry epiphany: Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small? Only as a patch of hillside may be a cliché corner To a fool who cries ‘Nothing but heather!’ (…) MacDiarmid then moves…
Richie McCaffery