Roddy Lumsden Reviews Angela Cleland's New Collection
The 2009 programme for Scotland's annual poetry festival has just been announced. Two planned discussion events there came to mind as I was preparing to write here about the poet Angela Cleland, whose first collection And in here, the Menagerie was published recently by Templar Poetry, one of the UK's most vibrant newer poetry presses.
One of the main strands of StAnza this year is 'Homecoming', chiming in with the year of events celebrating Scottish culture which marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns. StAnza has invited many Scottish poets who no longer live in the country back to read there, among them Kate Clanchy, Peter McCarey, myself and Stephen Scobie, a Carnoustie born poet who has lived in Canada since the mid 60s.
The whole business of being an artist, musician or writer who belongs to a country with a strong national identity but who no longer lives there is a complex one. Filipinos who move to live in Europe or America, for example, are no longer considered Filipinos by their countrymen. There is no sense of shunning in this – the concept of nationality is simply more closely bound with actually living there.
Am I a Scottish poet? I've been asked this on several occasions, to which I generally, and somewhat awkwardly reply, 'Scottish and a poet, but not really a Scottish poet,' by which I mean that my subject matter isn't particularly tied up with my nationality, and was little more so when I lived in St Andrews or Edinburgh, as opposed to, more recently, Bristol or London. The Homecoming discussion event will no doubt touch on these issues.
Another discussion will look at a perceived lack of young and talented Scottish poets. Is it cyclical? Are new poets put off, rather than encouraged, by a strong generation above them? The stats on all this are dispiriting – in the last 14 years, there has been no Scottish recipient of the Eric Gregory Award - these are prestigious annual prizes for poets under 30. In the previous 14 years, there were 16 Scottish winners. A major anthology I am currently preparing of the best British and Irish poets to emerge since the mid 90s will contain not one Scottish poet under 40.
All of which brings me to Angela Cleland's collection. Cleland is from Inverness, turned 30 last year and moved south to further her studies after university in Glasgow. I realise now that I've been meaning to write about this book for months and haven't because it's hard to pin down. Cleland is, I imagine, little known in Scotland and mostly known on the London poetry scene as a 'performance poet' (a term no one is very keen on in these days of poetic pluralism), and this is acknowledged in her biographical note. And sure enough, when I have seen her, there is an actorly aspect to her readings – the poems are recited and she adds some theatrical movement. This mostly works and, as much as it doesn't, it is because people don't expect movement outside of more overtly performance-based spoken word.
But this work doesn't seem performancey 'on the page', in fact it's disparate work, hard to pin down, hard to tell whether Cleland is finding her style or anxious not to settle comfortably on any one in particular. She can be light and formal (probably the poems I least like here) or can be imagistic and crisp, as in this short piece, 'Unruled':
A prickling, edgeless snowfield,
swelling like held breath.
I stop, settle into deep, creaking
coldness. It soaks through thin wellies,
two pairs of socks. I look back.
My footprints are too small for me.
A stencilled crow, black as ink,
glides low but will not land.
... a poem I prefer to read as a moment of actual existential doubt, as opposed to an extension of that overplayed metapoetic metaphor of ink/page and footprints/snow.
Elsewhere, her poems often fit with a return to the absurd which is notable among younger British poets at present. The title poem sees a man showing his new lodger around his collection of stuffed animals. There is plenty of sinister - one piece is about a cat morphing slowly into a dog, another about a body trying to cope with the sudden loss of its head, another about a woman being carried off by her inner horse.
Perhaps the best pieces here are longer ones – a week-length sequence of London morning vignettes; a song-like performance piece about a man sinking emotionally under his own guilt which makes fine use of repetitions; the final poem, which imagines the youthful Shelley setting off fire balloons carrying copies of the Declaration of Rights, is a rare example of a poem in a historical voice working with freshness.
This is a varied, interesting first collection from a younger poet. Whether she considers herself a 'Scottish poet', I don't know but like so many of our poets, she is published by an English press. If Canongate and Polygon can bring out fine books by younger English poets such as Patience Agbabi (Bloodshot Monochrome) and Sam Meekings (The Beastiary), perhaps they can do more to seek out the next generation of homegrown Scottish poets.
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Add to BasketAnd In Here, The Menagerie - - Hardback
£9.99
A collection of poetry by Scots poet, Angela Cleland, who was born in Inverness and brought up in Dingwall. She now lives, writes and performs in London.
