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| Best Scottish Poems 2007 Introduction |
The Poems | Acknowledgements
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The poems |
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| John
Purser |
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CroftworkThe twin died overnight Next morning, when I hear his throaty cry, I open the half door and step in. Unlock the locker. Another calf cry as his body twists, Choose the top barrel: The force flings half his body through an arc: Good gun the merciful. If such a day should come to me, From The Dark Horse, 20 (South Lanarkshire, 2007). Reprinted with permission from the author. My wife Barbara and I keep Highland cattle on our croft on Skye. Mostly there are no problems with calving, but the calf in this poem was one of twins born on a horrendous night of sleet and bitter east wind on the steep slopes below the house. One twin slipped down the hill into the trees and could not stand or reach his mother's udder. The other she had left behind. They were good sized male calves but by the time we got colostrum to them it was too late for them to gain any immunities. One died on the hill in the night beside its mother. The other died as described in the poem after two nights in the shed. As a poet I find myself too often wedded to truth and too determined to include every detail, as though one's observation was more than poetic, as though one were almost conducting a scientific analysis of both fact and emotion. An earlier version of this poem had too much detail in it and I shed some, but not all of it, in response to Gerry Cambridge's promptings. But the facts were as described because I wanted to convey something of the necessary analytical state of mind into which I had to project myself before killing the living creature we had tried so hard to keep alive. The end of the poem, however, expresses what I was really feeling inside – an empathy which easily travels across species and which features in a much earlier poem I wrote called 'A Share of the Wind'. On that occasion I had saved a calf's life by artificial respiration but, having had such intimate connection with it, wondered, when the animal came to be slaughtered would I too gasp and would my head feel pain. In this poem death was merciful, not commercial, and my situation brought to mind the heart-rending requests of soldiers appallingly mutilated begging their colleagues to shoot them. As for the last line: I don't like the idea of lingering farewells any more than lingering deaths. Besides, it's always best to clean up straight away. John Purser is not only a fine composer and musician, he's an accomplished poet who has been writing powerful, weighty poetry for at least thirty years. There's a seriousness, a gravitas to his work which is most impressive. Here he's revisiting familiar territory, the harsh, often brutal business of rearing cattle. The poem depicts the suffering and necessary slaughter of a young calf. The telling is unremitting in its detail, heartrending but utterly unsentimental and underscored with profound compassion. And the turn, the switch at the end to contemplation of the author's own mortality - a prayer for an equally kind deliverance - is stunning. Purser has published three books of poetry and his poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Of his six radio plays commissioned by the BBC, Carver won a Giles Cooper Award and was published by Methuen. In 1992 his book Scotland's Music won him the McVitie Scottish Writer of the Year Prize. An expanded edition of Scotland's Music was published by Mainstream in 2007 to accompany his second eponymous radio series for BBC Scotland. Purser is a Research Fellow at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic College on Skye. |
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