
Best Scottish Poems 2007 Introduction \| The Poems \| Acknowledgements

The poems

Mandy Haggith

Source

Author's note

Editor's comment

Biography

Yichang

in from the riverside
where the putter of boat engines dulls

you practise scales
by a low pool among trees

long slow notes climb up your flute
as rain drops ring

young sad notes
almost as still as the leaves

sweet green notes
tugging at the sleeves of ghosts

pulling over the water
like a kind of grieving

reeling us in
to stand in the rain

listening

Source

From Castings (Ullapool: Two Ravens Press, 2007). Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Author's note

Yichang is the Chinese city just downstream from the enormous dam being built on the Yangtse River. It is a port for huge cruise boats, plying what is left of the Three Gorges, and also for all manner of river freight. These are the engines whose putter is left behind at the start of the poem, as we follow the sound of a flautist playing slow scales in a park.

I went to Yichang as part of a long journey in 2006 researching the global paper industry. China represents extremes in the world of paper, having both ancient traditions of beautiful hand-made sheets and a fast-growing and horribly polluting modern pulp industry. The Yangtse dam is an icon of Chinese industrialisation, creating a reservoir that has led so far to the displacement of more than a million people. Thousands of farms, grave sites, historic monuments and sacred places have been drowned. The melancholy tone of this poem is a response to this loss.

Raindrops on still water and the simple, haunting flute music stand in direct contrast to the hubbub of the river and its industry. I think it is important for poetry to listen to and convey the quietness that lies behind the noise of public places.

I hope to show the slow notes of the musical scale through resonant single syllable words. There are lots of 'ing' words, to give a sense of the raindrop rings. It's an oral poem, intended to be read out, slowly, allowing all the rhymes to chime. At its heart, 'leaves' and 'sleeves' lead to 'grieving'.

This poem is in the third section of Castings, called 'Casting Adrift', the poems in which are the result of travels all over the world. It is the first of several about the Yangtse. The other two sections are from closer to home: 'Casting Off' is all about the River Kelvin in Glasgow, while 'Casting Ashore' is a bunch of poems about my home in Assynt.

Editor's comment

Mandy Haggith is yet another poet new to me, and another influenced by eastern sensibilities. This has all the delicacy of a Chinese scroll-painting - you can imagine it rendered as calligraphy trailing down the silk alongside a watercolour brush-drawing of trees, the river with the boat moored, its occupants reeled in by the flute player. It’s a moment of perfect stillness, attentiveness, rain falling on the leaves, on the pool, and we as readers are also reeled in to stand there, listening.

Biography

Mandy Haggith lives on a woodland croft in Assynt, where she works as a freelance researcher and writer. She is passionate about forests and has been working and campaigning for forests and their people for the past decade. She is currently working on a book called Pulp Fictions, about the impacts of our paper use. Her historical novel The Last Bear will be published by Two Ravens Press in March 2008.

Between 2003 and 2005, she studied with Tom Leonard at Glasgow University for a creative writing MPhil. She has had two poetry collections published: letting light in (Essencepress, 2005) and Castings (Two Ravens Press, 2007). After being listed, commended and runner up in various competitions, in October 2007 she achieved a long-standing ambition by winning first prize in the Northern Lights Festival poetry competition.