Two Scottish Poetry Books from Carcanet

Peter Davidson is a literary historian and renaissance expert based at the University of Aberdeen. In his early 50s, he has recently put out his first collection of poetry, The Palace of Oblivion (Carcanet). Unashamedly baroque in style (the book's working title was The Universal Baroque), the reader takes a while to tune in to the rich wordiness and historical subject matter of much of the verse, but the experience is rewarding. Sometimes, poetry which sends you reaching for the dictionary can be frustrating, but Davidson's unusual choices (caduceous, coloratura, stillicide) feel like they come from word-hoarding, rather then lofty academe.

The book is set out in three sections. The first, title sequence, is set in the 1600s, in a climate of courtly intrigue. The story told, as such, is not novelistic, but builds through a series of rich scenes set in gardens and palace corners. The following gives a flavour:

Thereafter, there is a sequence, sometimes reminiscent of Geoffrey Hill, which dips back and forward in time and deals with the idea of espionage and personal identity. The third section is more traditional and miscellaneous, mostly focussing on Aberdeenshire landscapes – this will come as no surprise to those who know Davidson's treasure trove book The Idea of North from a few years back, which deals with notions of northerness and northern landscapes in social history and literature.

I appeared on Radio 3's The Verb with Peter recently and was fascinated to speak to him about the collection, and to hear him bring the dense, stylised lines into liveliness in his careful reading voice. Once I tuned into The Palace of Oblivion, I found it one of the most surprising and original poetry debuts of recent years.

In contrast, Gerry McGrath, another Scottish poet - with another somewhat late debut from Carcanet – uses stripped back language, quiet, internal ideas and focusses on details of nature and the day-to-day. McGrath, who lives in Ayrshire, was forty when he unexpectedly wrote his first poem, inspired by a car run round Loch Lomond.

A to B (even the title is modest and minimalist) is driven by meetings of the abstract and actual, by questioning and quiet resolution. Scanning its blurb ('memory... places... secrets... evening... daylight... silence') gives you a flavour of the work and subject matter. McGrath's first poem was followed by a daily outburst of writing ('Is it luck, or a turnaround / in fortunes? I hope so. Where they spring / from God knows.' he writes in 'Steady') and sometimes the pieces read like poetic diary entries. They often begin matter-of-factly ('Yesterday I took a walk', 'On a train somewhere', 'In the morning they got up') and progress from there, generally sticking to working through a single idea. This short poem 'Cities' is a good example of his style:

Recent Scottish poetry has a strong strand of such work: lyric poetry based around contemplation and landscape. John Burnside, John Glenday, Kenneth White and Thomas A Clark have all worked in this area. The poems in A to B are stripped of trickery and sonics, relying on breath and rhythm for their music and, just as Davidson's work risks being 'too much' for some tastes, McGrath's risks being 'not enough'. The best poems here are those which open up to a little strangeness, either in syntax or detail – the anaphoric listing of 'Younger', the celebratory imagism of 'Watching Primrose', or the collision of ideas in 'Particles' ('Japanese businessmen sing Sinatra. / Blackbirds are quelled by daybreak. / Pink flamingo curtains, muslin-made / are hitched, harelipped, softly spoken / in softer light.').