Voices from the Northern Isles

MORAG MACINNES considers the poetic identities revealed in the work of three women poets based in Orkney and Shetland

THERE’S A game I used to play with lovers, children and students, called Botticelli. It’s fun and like all the best games – profound in a Miss-Scarlett-did-it-and-I–know-Why! sort of way. You assume a personality, and players have to guess who you are by asking off-beat questions, like: if you were a drink, what drink would you be?

With lovers, this can be very interesting – for example, when they say Magners and you were expecting Sauvignon Blanc.

Apply it to poets and it’s even better. If public transport on Orkney was a bit more developed, I could make a joke about – no poets for years and then three turn up at once. But alas, three buses turning up at once is an urban thing. So instead, we’ll play Botticelli with these three poets, and see what happens.

Two Ravens Press, the small whirlpool in Ullapool which is galvanising northern creativity, has published two Orkney collections – Yvonne Gray’s In The Hanging Valley, and GMB Fellow Pam Beasant’s running with a snow leopard. Shetland resident Jen Hadfield’s Poetry Book Society Recommendation Nigh–No–Place is published by Bloodaxe.

In Botticelli terms, – if we stay with the corvaceous and ask – if you were a bird, which bird would you be? – I’d say that Yvonne is a lavro (a lark), Pam is a stiggie (a starling), and Jen is a Roc ( the big, sometimes scary thing in the Arabian Nights that whirled you away in its claws ). These terms are not reductive in the least, by the way – in the spirit of the game, they are tributes to three unique voices.

When I asked these writers the question we all want answered – where did the voice come from? – Pam encapsulates it. Always wrote, she says, then used writing as a way to understand the loss of her father at the age of eight. Writing helps you understand. Making was about creating something new – Yvonne calls it early pleasure.

I asked about place, because I think the appreciation of your area is intrinsic to the way you experience the world – how you feel the landscape you look out at every day. The two Orkney poets fetched up here by mistake, despite family connections – but the landscape has seeped into their work.

Yvonne describes “walking around the coast or along tracks and field boundaries” to clear “the snarled tideline of anxiety the crazy day job leaves you with”. Pam says, “the travelling…. drives me nuts… but there is something here which is fundamental and exposing, and which seeps into your bones”. For Jen, Shetland is “a completely absorbing home… and home is what my poetry’s about. Home and place, no-home and no-place. Home in no-place.” She feels part of “the tiny and vast things that are happening everywhere… this is how we know we occupy the same present tense as the rest of the world”.

Of course I want to know who influenced their work – Jen, of course, goes for the sensual directness of Sharon Olds, the wandering wayfaring stranger that is WS Graham, and – a wee bit of a surprise this, but, |’Il guess, compelling because a born outsider – Edwin Morgan. The Roc’s seizing oddballs to take along on the carpet ride.

Yvonne likes Kathleen Jamie. I can see why – the direct detailed description of the natural world’s there, and a sensitive interpreter of tiny things. Robert Allan Jamieson, she rates, with Orkney poet Robert Rendall for strength and invention in a local voice. Dunbar’s a surprise – I think Yvonne has yet to find her bawdy, flighting voice – but yes, Ann Scott Moncrieff, and of course the idiosyncratic, funny, brave, underrated Margaret Tait.

Pam goes for Milton, and somehow I’m not shocked at all. Her work has a moral urgency and clarity of purpose, a directness, which has the kind of muscular quality, at it’s best, which is a direct descendant of that urgent need to tell it like it is, remind, warn.

Ask them what they’re working on now and you get – typically – the oh well I don’t know what will come of this but…. stuff. Jen is trying prose, not pining for poetry, a bit “unnerved… dipping in and out of the timeline, dressing the characters…”.

This novel is set in a fishing and cannery town somewhere like Torfino, in the north of Vancouver Island, where her grandfather was a G P. She’s got Arts Council funding for it, and discovered yesterday that the Chinook for heart is ‘tum – tum’. This fictional voice will be compelling and original, like the voice in Nigh–No–Place, which describes how blackbirds ‘chuckle and crash like coals/and try to get it on.’ I can’t wait.

Yvonne is working on a group of poems loosely entitled ‘Hours/Ours’ – about canonical hours and their times of day. “If Orkney has existed for a ‘day’, there might be something that marks each of these ‘hours’ – something to be celebrated, or lamented at each one.”

Pam’s nearly finished a novel; as for the poems, “it’s like everything was stuck in the door and now it can come out in an orderly fashion. There’s a huge backlog and lots of new stuff”.

Three voices; crazy organic free range Canadian Roc–bird; shy solitary highflying lavro; and multicoloured, urban/rural chronicler of the times. As I said; if you could talk about three buses arriving all at once and rendering you spoilt for choice at the Kirkwall Travel Centre, you would. Failing that – buy these womens’ poetry and celebrate the diverse talents we’re discovering up north.

© Morag MacInnes, 2008

Links

• Pamela Beasant
• Yvonne Gray
• Jen Hadfield