PREDICTIONS can be difficult to get right,
of course. And yet one can try to give some sense of the range of possibilities. Start with Hannah Lavery , poet, playwright, performer, director.
Lavery’s poem “Scotland, you’re no mine” defined a position of defiance against any conventional, static, fixed national identity, re-affirming the principle of openness not as a vague ideal but with specific points of reference. Racists and cowards might say Lavery does not belong in their “pure” xenophobic Scotland but the poem answers the question of belonging with: “I am limpet stuck on you”. It’s a nice pun: “stuck on” like superglue but also like a dreamy lover.
Nalini Paul draws on roots and myths from India, Canada and Scotland, in collections such as Skirlags and The Raven’s Song , while stage performance and verse combine in Beyond Mud Walls , bringing Scotland and India together through language, memory and the ambivalence of belonging and estrangement.
But Pennie was and is a contagion of health. As an advocate of the Scots language, in speech and writing, and of mental wellbeing as a correlative of linguistic self-confidence, her writing is a needed corrective to that national pathology known as the cringe. She comes from a long tradition of defiance of Anglophone, Anglocentric normativity.
THE locations or imagined landscapes in this poem don’t matter so much as the human contact happening through the ether of technology, and the threat of material, physical violence that can be felt in the body, a trembling, even as you read it. McCarey’s Orasho is a book of observances and considerations, poems and texts as barriers and bridges, coherences and fragments, amounting to a warranty of justice, still touching but going beyond what everyday occurrence brings. The poems in both books do what only poems can do. And underneath them all is a sense of moral redress.
Roseanne Watt draws on tender but essentially secure roots in the Shetland archipelago, and while publishing strong poems in Shaetlan Scots and English in Moder Dy / Mother Wave , is also an innovative musician and film-maker, combining words with moving images to complement, interrogate, riddle, cross, soak and marinade both genres with each other. Imagism arises between words and visualisation, with vulnerable, personal strengths transmitted through screened presences and aural landscapes.
Language itself is mixed, made up of impurities and diversities. This is as always, but perhaps more accepted as bringing potential benefit, so long as pluralism itself does not become a dulling convention. To be of any worth, literature, however defined, needs its cutting edge, to set against the dominance of uniformity, to oppose sterile conformity, to resist the dictates of supremacy and rules of the establishment, to stay open, and never give in to the closed. Poetry keeps its outlaw status.
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