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.