NewCon Press, 2023, 228 p.  Reviewed for ParSec 9.

This is the author’s first collection of stories, twenty-one in all, plus one poem. Sixteen of them were culled from appearances in a variety of outlets over the past ten years, five are making their first appearance in print. The contents range in genre over SF, fantasy, myth and horror, with stories sometimes crossing over their borders.

In general, literature deals largely with the themes of love, sex and death. Science Fiction tends to be more restrictive (love for example tends to be bypassed and sex for the most part avoided) but its signature feature is in making its metaphors literal. (The outstanding example of that here is the title story, about the bond between a daughter and her mother.) Fantasy, myth and horror act more as warnings and as stripped-down guides to human relationships.

In the first few stories here the theme of death seems to be a connecting thread but this does not then extend to the collection as a whole.

The poem, Icarus Dreams, opens proceedings and partly sets the tone by inviting Icarus to heed his father and rewrite his story. Smits is more than adequately equipped to provide new shapes to old tales. To that end there are herein updated treatments riffing on the Blackbeard and Theseus stories, while the Baba Yaga of Russian folklore meets an AI.

But the author has further strings to her bow. Elsewhere, moles on the skin are a marker of long, perhaps immortal, life, and carry the threat of incarceration to unravel their genetic secrets. We meet an AI repairman whose encounter with his charge becomes reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. One story (not narrated by Dr Watson) features Sherlock Holmes, but only in a bystanding part as he asks his psychic investigator – and female – cousin to help him. We have tales where a psychological decline follows the break-up of a relationship which had settled into routine, the Green Man appears to rescue a ravaged future Britain, a woman inherits a bookshop with an unusual kind of ghost, AI/human hybrids question each other over their origins – and the nature of God. One story centres on the reliving of bottled memories. There is an African inspired SF/fantasy cross-over. A woman falls in love with her witness protection AI android bodyguard, another tells of the lengths she went to in an attempt to get pregnant, a brother and sister hatch a plot to rescue their twin siblings from VR addiction in a warehouse, a female painter who sells pictures under her brother’s name finds she cannot hide her expertise from J M W Turner (with whom she shares the same reverence for sunlight,) two people celebrate their involvement with the commercial start-up of nuclear fusion at Sellafield, a woman on the point of death remembers incidents from her life while subjectively traversing a fantastical purgatorial maze.

Their telling requires a comprehensive array of authorial registers and Smits handles them all well, with very few infelicities. She is a talent to watch.

Pedant’s corner:- Theseus’ (x 2, Theseus’s,) focussing (x 2, focusing,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech,  Holmes’ (x 2, Holmes’s, which appeared later,) shrunk (shrank,) focussed (x 3, focused,) sunk (sank,) Geena Davis’ (Davis’s,) “legs akimbo” (I doubt it. It’s extremely difficult to put your feet on your hips,) “and laid down again” (lay down again,) data used as a singular noun (that would be datum, data is plural,) Jesus’ (Jesus’s,) “the settings on each gamer’s capsule isn’t” (the settings … aren’t,)  “‘it’s okay to chop down all the forests and poison the soil.’?” (has that question mark in the wrong place. It ought to be where the full stop is,) “him and Kel had looked to the stars” (he and Kel,) James’ (x 3, James’s; annoyingly employed a few pages later.) “A trail of soapy bubbles stream after his fleeing form” (a trail streams.) Plus points, though, for using maw correctly as a stomach.

Canongate, 1998, 77 p.

MacNeil first published works of poetry before going on to write some of the most idiosyncratic novels to come out of Scotland this century – or indeed the past many decades. (See The Stornoway Way, A Method Actor’s Guide to Jekyll and Hyde and The Brilliant and Forever.) This was his first book of poems and comprises IV Parts, the first of which, Learning the Art, consists mostly of very short stories which are poem-like in their economy. A couple are written in a form of English which approximates the Western Isles dialect. (The author is from Lewis.) The remainder of the book contains poems – some as terse as haiku – written in English or in Gaelic with English translations appended.

Pedant’s corner:- “ ‘We’ll go hack to the pub,’” (back,) “the lay of the land” (it wasn’t a song so ‘lie of the land’.)

Thirty four Scottish books read this year; equally divided between female and male authors. Fiction, Poetry, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Non-fiction, Football. I have linked to my reviews if they have appeared here.

No Dominion  by Louise Welsh

Hieroglyphics by Anne Donovan

For the Good Times by David Keenan

Wild Geese by Nan Shepherd

Paper Cup by Karen Campbell

The Christmas Truce by Carol Ann Duffy

A Would-Be Saint by Robin Jenkins

Something Like Happy by John Burnside

The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark

The Dark Remains by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin

Scotland’s Lost Clubs by Jeff Webb

The Oath Takers by Naomi Mitchison

Vinland by George Mckay Brown

Beethoven’s Assassins by Andrew Crumey

Chimera by Alice Thompson

Hester by Mrs Oliphant

Antimacassar City by Guy McCrone

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

The Philistines by Guy McCrone

Fishnet by Kirstin Innes

A Gift From Nessus by William McIlvanney

Sea-Green Ribbons by Naomi Mitchison

Companion Piece by Ali Smith

Night Boat by Alan Spence

Europa Deep by Gary Gibson

Murder in the Merchant City by Angus McAllister

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker

The Puritans by Guy McCrone

King Hereafter by Dorothy Dunnett

Escape From Hell by Hal Duncan

The Pearl-fishers by Robin Jenkins

The Bachelors by Muriel Spark

Klaus by Allan Massie

Early in Orcadia by Naomi Mitchison

Poems by Jackie Kay illustrated by Rob Ryan Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2019, 94 p. First published 2009.

Quite why this volume of poetry comes under the imprint of a children’s publisher is slightly mystifying. I would say that the poems it contains are not particularly restricted to a child audience. Lines like, “Time is a loop stitch. I knit to keep death away,” would certainly indicate as much. However, grandmothers and knitting are recurrent subjects.

Some of the more memorable poems came towards the end of the book.

Great-Grandmother’s Lament contrasts the present-day childhood engagement with screens to what occurred in the past. Shetland is a love poem to that archipelago and includes sly allusions to lines from popular songs. Like its title, The Nine Lives of the Cat Mandu riffs, punningly or otherwise, on the word ‘cat’ or proverbs/phrases involving either it or the three letters it contains in their order. First and Foremost does something similar for ‘first’. Double Trouble uses opposites to make its point. Sour Sixteen embodies the passage of a child’s life to that age in terms of how quickly those years pass for a parent. First X compares voting for the first time, with thanks to the suffragettes, to a first kiss, x.

This week’s contribution to Judith’s meme at Reader in the Wilderness.

So, I hear you ask, is it old books or an old bookcase?

Well, it’s both.

This is known in our house as, “my Dad’s bookcase,” (or, depending on who is speaking, “your Dad’s bookcase.”)

The top three shelves contain classic books, some of them leather-bound, and poetry collections; the lower two have reference books and military history.

Also in the Guardian Review on Saturday was, under the heading “A Box of Delights” (though the website has “Reasons to be Cheerful,”) a small collection of new stories, poems and illustrations to lighten our mood in these times of plague and lockdown.

One that particularly caught my eye was a poem published under the rubric:-

Care of Exotic Pets
Number 1. The Axolotl at Bedtime by Catherine Johnson.

It starts, “Never give your axolotl chocolatl in a botl.”

It goes on to use nine more – different – rhymes for axolotl. You know how I love an inventive, or a fitting, rhyme. I didn’t care a whit that every single one of them was misspelled. Those misspellings served to emphasise the Aztec origins of the word axolotl (not to mention chocolate. Sorry, chocolatl.)

It was a delightful jeu d’esprit and fair cheered me up.

Picador, 2015, 583 p, including indexes of titles and first lines.

Duffy’s Selected Poems was one of the Scotsman’s 20 Scottish Books Everyone Should Read. I’m counting this compendium of 10 of her books of poetry as a reasonable substitute. Looking at that Scotsman list I see I have now read five more on it than when I made the original post.

The book contains poems from nine of Duffy’s previous collections, Standing Female Nude, Selling Manhattan, The Other Country, Mean Time, The World’s Wife, Feminine Gospels, Rapture, The Bees, Ritual Lightning, plus her, as the blurb has it, “much-loved”, Christmas Poems.

Standing Female Nude I have already read. As for the rest:-
From Selling Manhattan we have the embedded metaphor of a poem written as if by a ventriloquist’s dummy, revelation of the stories that roil beneath the surface in a Model Village, Absolutely deploys an impolite word to great effect, Yes, Officer conveys the plight of an accused person, Politico references Glasgow’s coat of arms to deplore the betrayal that was the city’s industrial decline, Mouth, With Soap the purposelessness, in the grand scheme of things, of minding your language, Correspondents and Telegrams relate love affairs carried on through different communication media, and for personal reasons I loved the Jane Avril Dancing fragment of Three Paintings.
In The Other Country, Originally reflects on the experience of losing a part of your identity when as a child your family moves elsewhere while Too Bad seems to be about a hitman. Poet For Our Times rather wonderfully rhymes poet with show it and Serbo-Croat.
In Mean Time, the poem Litany expresses the enduring memory of the shame of speaking outside the bounds of politeness. Stafford Afternoons the lack of surprise in encountering a flasher. Prayer evokes the lyricism of the names from the shipping forecast.
The poems from The World’s Wife are brilliant reimaginings of myths, fairy tales and figures from history from the female viewpoint. Mrs Darwin, Frau Freud, Mrs Sisyphus and Mrs Icarus are particularly biting.
Feminine Gospels contains what its title suggests. Beautiful is about famous women throughout history, and how they were treated. The longest poem, The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High, might as well be a short story.
Rapture’s poems are mostly about love; fine on an individual basis but faced collectively begin to merge into one another. However, the sentiment “Falling in love is glamorous hell” seems about right and “When did your name change from a proper noun into a charm?” captures that ecstatic first flush perfectly.
While some of the poems in The Bees do concentrate on or refer to that insect many do not. Three – LastPost, New Vows and Premonitions – reflect on the possible consolations the reversal of time could bring. The first of those and The Passing Bells derive inspiration from the work of Wilfred Owen. Big Ask examines the evasions those in power practice to avoid embarrassment.
Ritual Lightning must have been a very small volume when it was published on its own, with only 17 or so poems. Liverpool is a reflection on the Hillsborough tragedy, Birmingham demonstrates that extreme Islamophobia is no newcomer to these shores, White Cliffs’s “something fair and strong implied in chalk/what we might wish ourselves” shows up the distance between actuality and sense of self, Pathway is a remembrance of the poet’s father, while The Crown’s last three words, “not lightly worn,” are more a modern day desideratum than a historical truism.
The “much-loved” Christmas poems turn out to be five in number. The 11 page long Mrs Scrooge is of course inspired by A Christmas Carol and reworks that in a reversal. The always joy-dispensing Mrs Scrooge has outlived her husband but still encounters the three ghosts. It derives much of its impact from a pun. The Christmas Truce is a pretty much unadorned celebration of that peaceful interlude in The Great War’s first winter, Wenceslas encourages the charitable impulse, Bethlehem imagines the scene at that first Christmas, Dorothy Wordsworth’s Christmas Birthday does the same for 1799.

Pedant’s corner:- hung (hanged, x3,) Orpheus’ (Orpheus’s,) Goldilocks’ (Goldilocks’s,) span (spun,) “iCallaos! iCallaos! iCallaos! iQuedense!” (those “i”‘s in front of Callaos and Quedense should be upside down exclamation marks,) lay down (laid down,) lay (laid,) homeopathy (homoeopathy,) Señora Devizes’ (Devizes’s,) mistress’ (mistress’s,) leucippotomists (I have no idea what this means,) reindeers, x2 (the plural of reindeer is reindeer.) Colly-Flowre (a deliberate archaism no doubt.)

Picador, 2016, 67 p.

A reprint of what is stated to be Poet Laureate Duffy’s first collection but both Wiki and Fantastic Fiction have it otherwise. The slim volume contains 49 poems. A few are only 7 or 8 lines long, most are of longer length, some are sonnets and employ that most passé of poetic devices, rhyme. Much of Duffy’s verse here tells stories. Several deal with unsympathetic husbands.

This is a strong assortment of poems with the most memorable including Lizzie, Six which seems to be about child abuse, while Ash Wednesday, 1984 employs rhyme to emphatic effect in imploring parents not to subject their children to religion, Jealous as Hell uses unusual stripped-down syntax and grammar to help make its point, Terza Rima SW19 varies from classic terza rima rhyming but does so to good effect, Where We Came In is a modern take on La Ronde with divorcees meeting up complete with new spouses, Free Will dwells on the lingering effects of an abortion, A Clear Note’s three sections tell a story of three generations of women. The title poem examines the distance between an artist and his sitter, What Price? is about The Hitler Diaries and those who thought to make money from them, Borrowed Memory the reality of incidents in novels to some people’s sense of themselves, while Shooting Stars is a plea not to forget atrocities.

Picador, 2012, 59 p

Winner of the 2012 Costa Poetry Award, shortlisted for the 2012 T S Eliot Prize.

35 poems, most one pagers, one six pages, the rest two. 2 are eftir Hölderlin (as is one in Jamie’s later collection The Bonniest Companie). Hölderlin seems to be one of her favourite models. Most poems here are in English with the odd Scots word but some are entirely Scots. Nature, or those working in the outdoors, is an inspiration for many and there is an abiding seriousness to her poems, though she is not beyond essaying a pun for a last line. An odd quirk was that some poems had missing full stops at their conclusion, as if they’re unfinished. Understandable enough for those two entitled Fragment 1 and Fragment 2.

I most enjoyed Excavation and Recovery with its evocation of deep time partly because I have seen (in Perth and Abernethy Museums respectively) the log boat whose archaeological recovery it partly describes and a depiction of the dig process.

Picador, 2015, 70 p including 1p Notes and Acknowledgements.

This, Jamie’s latest book of poetry, won the Saltire Society Book of the Year Award for 2016.

There are 47 poems here of which only two stretch over 1 page in length. Most take the form, if not the formal structure, of a sonnet, though Soledades has eight lines of what look like prose before opening out in its last three lines. Some are very short indeed. The last, Gale, has only 16 syllables, shorter than a haiku. The longest, Another You, bears out the potency of cheap music, the titular deer in The Hinds are “the bonniest companie”. Ben Lomond refers to the bonny banks in a poem which, like the song containing those lines, is about death and remembrance. 23/9/14 is an injunction to gird up again after the Scottish Independence Referendum. High Water compares ocean tides to an adulterous affair, Scotland’s Splendour scopes out the delights of memories from a book stumbled on in a charity shop, Wings Over Scotland is a litany of the recorded deaths of birds of prey on various landed estates, taken – verbatim it would seem – from the original reports.

The language Jamie uses goes from standard English to various degrees of Scots depending on the poem. Migratory II, (eftir Hölderlin) is the most uncompromisingly Scottish. The prevalence of poems about animals or landscape places Jamie’s poetry firmly within the tradition of Scottish literature.

Pedant’s corner:- midgies (I know Scottish spelling is a moveable feast but midges, please,) “one less left” (“one fewer” sounds more natural to me.)