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Scottish Poems 2005 Introduction |
The Poems | Acknowledgements
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The poems |
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| Iain Galbraith |
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Cherry TimeIt is light past seven when the door bell rings. the two girls on their tiptoes daring while the colander parties jammed and pruned their younger voices erased from the tape The sun has burned all the dormouse day in your ear. Of what do the decades consist? the spill as of sand and the red berries passing First published in The Times Literary Supplement, 20th August 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author. Inspiration for the cherries? Why, nine ladies in red cagoules I met coming down by the Horsehoof Burn on the slopes of Beinn Helicoinnich, near the village of Arrochar (in the older Scottish script: Áσκρα) – or thereabouts. Poets have been telling tall tales about poems for as long as poetry has been written. Hesiod tells us the nine Muses taught him 'fine singing' on Helicon, because that was where he 'tended his lambs'. There is nothing harder to define. I go about my works and days hoping for an answer (continuity at last?). There are days when the view of the Beinn is surprisingly clear across the Rhine, but only if no one asks me … The North African Neo-Platonist Augustine said something similar about Time, and the dimension of poetry is surely no less elusive. If I knew what a poem was “about”, or where it was 'coming from', I would never write it. The imponderables are the core of the poem, not its ponderables; its truth is no less concrete for that. Okay, if I wanted to distinguish this one from any other, I might say it was the poem about cherry-picking with my daughters, or about the double-slit experiment (which the physicist Richard Feynman has described as 'In reality, the only mystery'), or about Mnemosyne (Memory, mother of the Muses). But these are incidental. The digger may have got into the poem because I saw it from my kitchen window. Or maybe not. After all, there are many things visible from my kitchen window (some of them turn up in other poems). I do remember going cherry picking. So what if I was living on a building site at the time? And the triadic structure? The poem had a longer, almost epic reach before I slashed it to size. I met a surgeon in Freiburg once who had me diagnosed as the 'gall-bladder type' before I had even told him my complaint; he could see what was going on inside a person by looking at their skin. There’s always something like that if you look at the form a poem makes – it’s the poem makes it, after all, not the poet. It’s been a while since I wrote it, but to judge by the dust on its feet and the hues of its skin (it was Pierre Reverdy who wrote of the form of a poem as its 'skin') ‘Cherry Time’ has been on a long journey, and, for reasons best known to itself, has, in passing, come in to tell us the tale. The moment it got here it latched on to all these unlikely pointers and starters – a host of jumbled shapes and sounds (phew! I almost said daffodils) it seemed to know from elsewhere. There was something else it wanted: it wanted these words precisely, then to be off and away … Another journey? It has stopped giving me dreams. In that sense it came, took what it wanted and left. A summery poem about memory. There is a kind of distortion in the telling of the cherry-pickers which seems absolutely in keeping with the nature of memories, and I especially liked the image of 'a digger up to its oxters / in roses'. I was born in Arrochar (if you don’t count a night spent bawling my head off in a Glasgow hospital) to a mother whose father was a Bradford wool trader and a father who came from a long line of Highland sheep farmers. They met at Edinburgh University, sold their last sheep, and ran a hotel – but by my mid-teens the woolliness of my own thinking, warm as it was, sent me seeking allies for a naked rebellion: it must be possible, such was my notion, to shear a sentence to clarity. It wasn’t long before the woolly metaphors didn’t fit. For years I’d given all my spare hours to fishing, and hadn’t read a book. Then a teacher gave me poems by Ted Hughes. They brought a sea-change: fish and much else could be coaxed onto paper without hooks. A couple of years later I took a driving test and started to travel. Allies? A growing number. If I listen closely on frosty mornings, and despite great distances, Catullus, Horace, Hölderlin, Clare, Dickinson, Stevens, Montale, Lowell, Herbert, Bishop, Graham and Berryman (others too, and some living men and women I won’t name) still hand me the jump-leads. |
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