Angus
Peter Campbell’s poetry – like his crystalline prose – brings together the
all-encompassing encyclopaedic and the fragmentary: the epic and the gloss. Or
rather his is a work of epic decayed into fragments, relics redolent with
mystery and meaning, that can be shored against our ruin, sowed – like seeds – anew,
or which take a surrealist twist in the modern world. His work bridges the age
of the plough and the age of the space-shuttle, with an awareness that – in his
own words – that bridge can be a bit rickety, frayed and ad-hoc.
Campbell
was born and raised in South Uist, and the (material) culture and the people of
the island persist throughout his work as a ghostly presence, worked upon by memory,
the imagination and time. In ‘An t-Seann Chairt Againn’ [Our Old Cart],
typically, a childhood memory – recollected with perfect pitch – of a cart that
carried ‘badan feòir is cocan-eòrna’ or ‘còig gille deug air am pronnadh’
[‘stooks of hay and jagged corn’ or ‘fifteen squashed boys’] is transformed
through the passing of time. The carthorse – introduced and dismissed in only
two lines (Campbell is a consummate storyteller) – is sold to a passing tinker;
the cart gets taken over by the imagination, as a ship to America, as a
spaceship to the moon, and then – practically – as a set of goal-posts now
rusting.
This
is a poetry of possession and dispossession, of the losses and gains that
history enacts on a place, a culture, an individual. But it is not a poetry of
nostalgic romanticism, but rather of wit, irony, satire, and – overall –
wonder. Campbell’s voice manages the fine balancing act on the edge of the
plough – being at once aware of the vicissitudes of time and warm-hearted
towards us who have to live through history’s ironies and swift passages. His
novels lightly bear the influence of the magical realism of Borges and Garcia
Marquez; in his poetry there are the traces of the Eastern European poets Vasko
Popa, Miroslav Holub, Czeslaw Miloscz, Zbigniew Herbert, Anna Swir.
And
like the work of these poets, Campbell’s is a poetry that witnesses while also being
aware of the difficulties associated with witnessing and the media. Camera
crews appear repeatedly in his work, (unsurprising given that he has had great
success working in journalism, television and film). They arrive suddenly and
depart with some nugget of culture or history taken from the community – in
this way they are similar to tinkers, who again recur in his work, as cyphers
for the poet as collector or gatherer – with the understanding that this is not
an entirely innocent position.
‘Ecclesiastes’,
for example, takes its starting point from the famous biblical passage, much beloved
at weddings, and plays with notions of collecting or gathering items or letting
them go. It settles for the latter
’S fheàrr a leigeil seachad:
a chànan aon-fhillte, Uibhist nam
bò,
an drochaid chliùiteach, a ghealaich
shlàn. ’S fheàrr
tulgadh nan clach air a’ chaolas,
giolcam-daobhram na frìde,
tobhta fhosgailte na frìthe,
seach saoghal cruinnichte nam
mìrean.
Better to let go:
the perfect language, Uist of the
cattle,
the famous bridge, the full moon.
Better
the shoogly stones in the water,
the animalcule of the fleshmite,
the open hovel on the moor,
than the gathered emblems of the
world.
The
mìrean – or fragments or gathered emblems – that do appear in Campbell’s work
are multifaceted, and often work with and subvert the conventions of
frameworks, whether they be metrical forms, proverbs or abecedearies – a form perfectly
suited to his scope. ‘Aibisidh’, the self-ironising title poem of APC’s most
recent collection, shows his range, playfulness and attention to the riches of
different cultural heritages. The poems in Gaelic and English – translation in
the loosest sense – run through a gamut of songs in the different language
traditions; the fragments and phrases, thrown together, tell a story by turns
tragic, comedic, romantic and then – fittingly – joyously nonsensical, ending
on the phonemes ‘Ud ud aithearam’ and ‘Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay’ [I’m
not going to sing any of them!]
This
is an ethical poetry in as much as it deals with questions of worth, of what is
valuable in our experiences, and how we should engage with the world around us.
Aonghas MacNeacail has commented that Campbell has a ‘surrealist wit which he
uses towards ends which are quietly satirical and gently moralistic… He doesn’t
preach, but he does invite us to draw conclusions.’ Campbell could never be
accused of not caring, of standing back, or of retreating to the academic and
the obscure. There is always a sense of right and wrong in his work, and the
intellectual acuteness underlying all of it is matched – as in Aibisidh – by playfulness, defiance and
passion. Campbell’s work is emotional and earthy as well as verbally dextrous;
among his best poems are his most personal. In ‘A’ Bhàs’ [The Vase] the smell
of lilies fills the room after his mother’s death; in ‘Geallaidhean’ [Promises],
abstract poetic promises are given an electric erotic charge.
With
his insistent, light-footed examinations of human nature, and particularly what
it means to be a Gaelic speaker from South Uist, alive at this precise moment,
within different heritages and traditions, conflicting and confluent, and transported
from a radically different past, Angus Peter Campbell is – as you would expect
for the winner of the wonderfully titled Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust
Book Awards 2012 for best poetry collection for Aibisidh, beating the Poet Laureate among others– one of the most important and
unmissable poets writing in Scotland. It is a great pleasure to hear him read
today on National Poetry Day.
Dr
Peter Mackay: introduction to a reading by Angus Peter Campbell at The
Pleasance, Edinburgh, on National Poetry Day, October 4th 2012.