Slaughtering Beetroot - A Chapbook from Angela McSeveney

At Edinburgh University in the mid 1980s, I was lucky to meet a crowd of young writers who found themselves in the ambit of writers in residence such as Anne Stevenson and Liz Lochhead. The extra-curricular nature of these meetings, workshops and readings meant they didn't feel like education, but we were learning our craft. Quite a few of these writers have gone on to success: AB Jackson and myself in poetry, Mike Cullen in drama and screenplay writing, Rosie Cowan as a business and crime journalist and Matthew Fitt as poet, children's writer and novelist.

Perhaps the most prolific, and most clearly voiced, poet amongst us was Angela McSeveney, who had moved up from Galashiels and found inspiration from Liz Lochhead's mentoring. McSeveney (and I hesitate to call her that, as she has a memorable poem about how writers being referred to by surname reminds her of the bellowing of games teachers!) would appear most weeks with a new poem, crisp and clear, in the plain style she still adopts now, as I see from her new chapbook Slaughtering Beetroot, recently published by Mariscat Press (£5).

This early, productive period led to a book from Polygon while still in her twenties. Its title, Coming Out With It, acknowledged the other most noticeable aspect of her poetry – its being strongly centred on the personal. It would be wrong to call her work 'confessional' however, as even when the personal details shared are awkward or intimate, the poet never seems unwilling to share them, or to be milking them for shock value.

Some of McSeveney's familiar subject matter is reopened here – baths and swimming, hats and hair, perceptions of feminine beauty, the body's frailty. This last subject has brought out two of the pamphlet's strongest poems – one on the spine, another on the body's constant shedding of hair and skin ('It's not at the very end that we return / to the earth we came from. / It takes us back in instalments'). Those who enjoy poems on the subject of food will be charmed by the title piece, and poems on baking, Chinese food (McSeveney's husband is Chinese) and pickled onions, which set off her love of similes ('a bag of wet albino marbles, frogspawn trawled from a muddy ditch...').

Angela McSeveney's poetry might not appeal to all tastes. Beyond those similes, she is trick-light. Don't expect interrupted narratives, natty rhyme schemes or associative leaps. Lines end where you expect them to, the language is mostly everyday, the subject matter close to home. It's a testament to her guile in composing in this fashion that I enjoy these poems so much, my taste being generally for more complex and textured, more sonically driven poetry.

There are a number of poets writing at the moment who make skilful use of low style – Matthew Sweeney and Neil Rollinson come to mind, and the straightforward, yet alluring poems of Catherine Smith. Since her first book, McSeveney has been an unprolific writer, taking a decade to put together her second collection Imprint. This pamphlet follows six years later, suggesting she produces just a handful of poems each year with which she is happy. I hope that, in a year or two's time, with a dozen or so new poems, she might consider persuading a bigger publisher to publish a Selected Poems which might bring her more of the acknowledgement she deserves.