A land of just-passing-throughs

In his sixth collection of poems, David Wheatley continues the exploration of Scottish culture and landscape he embarked on midway through his fifth, The President of Planet Earth (2017). The new book’s opening, “The Companions of Colmcille”, places the poet, an Irishman now based in rural Aberdeenshire, in continuity with a joint Hiberno-Scottish history and psychogeography. In the hypnotic “Immigrant Song” (2020), the similarly scenic aspects of both countries, that of his past and that of his present, are coterminous, two mountains facing each other “in the cracked distorting mirror / of a mirage-afflicted view”.

The Scottish signposts are faithfully in evidence: the cairns and the corries, words of Gaelic and Scots, that old Jacobite business, the “joyous lament” for Scotlands of the mind and of the past, which are often the same thing. Wheatley’s locale – the Pitfichie and Bennachie hills, Alford, Inverurie – is a land of just-passing-throughs epitomized by the indecipherable Picts, “impossible kindred, cancelling / all others, but anything they might say lost”, echoing the theme of abandonment especially characteristic of Scottish lamenting.

But Wheatley, like the Scotland he portrays, is erudite and never parochial. His sensibility is populated with painters, French symbolist and surrealist writers, John Clare and Andrew Marvell, and – via homage or elegy – the likes of Roy Fisher, Tom Paulin and Nan Shepherd. Variety of inspiration is matched by variety of form: the prose poem, the pamphlet-length poem, the intertextual “lecture” with footnotes, the shopping list of similes, the mid-line caesura, the mid-line caesura with shapes, etc. Such range enriched The President of Planet Earth. Here, however, it feels like a distraction from a more concentrated force: Wheatley’s keen sense of transitoriness, best paired with his talent for the personal lyric.

Life is a “decades-long joke” that “starts funny, / goes off in the middle, before getting funny again”, he perceives after watching his small children being fussed over by the elderly ladies of the local charity shop – a shop ultimately awaiting “the shirts on our back” (“Homage to Inverurie”). Having accompanied his toddler daughter through the soft-play centre’s chaos, he concludes that Philip Larkin’s “long slide” is something “there is / in fact no wrong way to go down” (“Long Slide”). This loving generosity is repeated in the titular “Child Ballad”, written from the perspective of his newborn daughter: “I am citizen, not subject, freeborn / daughter of the future I will earn”. This poem distils the collection’s best lyrical and formal attributes:

Nine months I sailed within my mother, now
head up, now down, a fitful questing prow
in search of wider seas. Now you are the tide
I plough, wide world; grant my sails godspeed.

While the actual “Child Ballads”, 305 traditional ballads anthologized by Francis James Child in the nineteenth century, comprise a small part of Wheatley’s landscape (a sonnet, also called “Child Ballad”, draws on “The Outlandish Knight”, Child Ballad 4), they are the sole focus of Peter Armstrong’s Two Ceremonies at the Border. “The Death of Parcy Reed” (Child Ballad 193) and “The Ballad of Johnnie Armstrong” (Child Ballad 169) are reimagined and embellished into free-verse narrative sequences, the former divided into eleven stages of the Catholic Mass, the latter into the fourteen Stations of the Cross. The reason for such devotional frameworks is suggested in a reference to the Border ballad as a “dark gospel” through which one can “bear witness” and strive for “healing”.

The joyous lamentation here concerns the “blood economy”, the Anglo-Scottish borderland’s interminable cycle of betrayal and brutality a “blood-bond between / the living and the dead // and the soon-to-be-dead / and the soon-to-be-killers / for ever and ever // amen” – hence that need for healing. Things do not end well for either Reed the lawman (“his little kingdom / his abattoir”) or Armstrong the “feudfaced” reiver, Reed’s body parts carried home in pillow cases after “an unsaintly ending” that goes well beyond Christ’s for violence, Armstrong hanged by “Gangmeister Jamie” (James V, a Scottish Pilate). The blend of balladic, biblical and historical allusions is deftly achieved, elevating the protagonists to something between – to quote David Wheatley’s poem “Wolf Girl, Clais Mhadaidh” – “restoration / and the irremediable”. “History drips / from the victor’s pen // onto the winner’s page”, observes Peter Armstrong, “but song owes it nothing.”

Robert Selby’s most recent collection of poems is The Kentish Rebellion, 2022

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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