On Irish Poets Writing in Scotland

101 ON IRISH POETS WRITING IN SCOTLAND Peter Mackay DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2023.65.7 Abstract: Starting from the polyglot work of the Dublin-born and Skye-based Rody Gorman, who writes in Scottish and Irish Gaelic, English and his own invented translation of “intertonguing,” this essay explores recent poetic connections between the two countries through readings of Irish poets who live or have lived in Scotland: the Gaelic and Irish peregrinations of David Wheatley, and the “minoritized diasporic” position of poets in English such as Alan Gillis, Miriam Gamble, and Aoife Lyall. It discusses ways in which these poets engage with dislocation, linguistic multiplicity, the risks of being absorbed into a new environment, and the possibility of flitting – Sweeneylike – between places, literatures, and trees. It ends with a focus on the diasporic Gaelic writing of Niall O’Gallagher, and how he negotiates his Irish inheritance. There is an unexpected focus on bodybuilding, birds, and moths; on people being transformed into dolphins; and an unregretful Columba cheerily leaving Ireland behind. Keywords: Irish poetry, Scottish poetry, Sweeney, transformations, cianalas, poetic resistance, feathers Some context: I write this as someone who was, for a while, a Scottish poet living in Ireland. The first poems I wrote as an adult were written in Dublin, and read in the St Stephen’s Green Unitarian Church for a Poetry Introductions night organised by Noel Monahan. I had got a sense that the poems might actually be reasonable by showing them (at his kitchen table in Camus Crois on the Isle of Skye) to Rody Gorman, a Dubliner who has made his home in Scotland. There were – and still are – few other Scottish poets living and writing in Ireland: the trip south-west across the Sea of Moyle is not one commonly made, at least not to uproot and re-root. Moving back to Scotland in 2010, and living here with an Irish poet, I came to realise that the reverse was not the case, that the flights from Dublin and Belfast to Edinburgh and Glasgow, the ferry from Belfast or Larne to Stranraer or Cairnryan, were lines of poetic connection, displacement and nostalgia, for a Peter Mackay 102 sizeable – and generally ignored individually or en masse – number of Irish poets writing in Scotland. This is a group who often fit only awkwardly, if at all, within the established Irish communities around the country. They are not even a minoritized group, but a shadow of a community: poets sometimes claimed by Scotland, sometimes not, poets sometimes remembered in Ireland, sometimes not; these dynamics are irrational. Many, but not all of the poets I’ll talk about are personal friends, and this essay is perhaps thus an act of recognition as much as of criticism. Certainly, it would be dishonest of me to ignore my own intricate relationship to the poets I’ll talk about; it would also be dishonest to ignore the erraticness of the Scottish poetry scene – born largely out of the incredible poverty of cultural debate in the country – that sometimes celebrates, sometimes does not, the poets living in the country no matter where they were born. The conversation between Ireland (the Republic and the North) and Scotland is a multi-lingual one, involving English, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Scots, and Ulster Scots. In his 2017 collection The President of Planet Earth, David Wheatley’s paean to the Scottish concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay (almost) ends with the short poem “Eilean”: “A lochan, a flat stone / placed in its centre – / Scotland, I have / added an island / to your store.”1 Attitudes to such a process of personal, cultural cairn building – on a national scale, and across languages (the Gaelic-titled “eilean” leading to, being glossed by, the five-line English poem) – are broadly what I will be looking at, in the work of Gorman, Wheatley, Alan Gillis, Niall O’Gallagher, Miriam Gamble, and Eoghan Walls, with brief discussion of Aoife Lyall and Rachel McCrum. (There are other figures I could mention – Leontia Flynn, say, who spent a formative year in Edinburgh.) This is a process of archipelagic creation and exploration, of building bridges between islands, languages, and literatures (the concrete poetry of Hamilton Finlay and Morgan doesn’t have a comparable tradition in Ireland), and individual poems. But the poets also have the knowledge that such bridges, like the one north of Tolsta on the Isle of Lewis, might ultimately be bridges to nowhere. In 2015, the Dublin-born poet Ailbhe Darcy, while she was living in Germany (she now lives in Wales), suggested that Eoghan Walls, Miriam Gamble, Dylan Brennan, and herself were poets of a “new wave” of the Irish diaspora who had a different experience of exile to those born before the 1980s: Unlike previous exiles, many know what it’s like to feel entitled to the pursuit of pleasure, material goods, or a prosperous future. The new Irish Diaspora is different, too, by dint of the unprecedented mobility and access 1 David Wheatley, The President of Planet Earth (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2017) 163. On Irish Poets Writing in Scotland 103 to information bestowed on them by new technology… Because this generation of the Irish Diaspora—of which I am a part—is different, reading backwards into the literature of Ireland’s past can only take us so far. We must read around us and learn from writers in other places. Because our own writing cannot assume a local readership, as it might if we had stayed home, we have to hope that it reaches out to readers beyond the Irish.2 This is perhaps too confident about the strength of that “local readership” in the first place and suggests that wider reading only comes from an experience of exile (which is not necessarily the case). The hint of a (positively) uprooted global citizenship is perhaps to be lauded, but it might equally have been found in Mandelstam’s “nostalgia for world culture,” and “reading backwards into the literature of Ireland’s past” does still retain its (nostalgic) attractiveness for many. Nevertheless, the central tensions are salutary: the questions of what and where each poet is reading and learning, and who they are writing for, are central and slippery, as is the relationship (present or absent) with Ireland or any sense of “home.” The poetry of Rody Gorman, for example, puts particular pressure on the apparently insignificant preposition “bhuam.” Ciaran Carson meditated for a whole book on the power of the prepositions Until Before After (2010), but it is physical distance rather than temporal ordering (or the relationship between the two) that preoccupies Gorman’s poetic eye. “Bhuam” he most often renders as “over there” – or, in the recent “intertonguings,” “farawaywanting from us” (in dictionaries it would most likely appear as “far from me”).3 The attention to what is “over there,” combined with a complicated sense of “wanting,” recurs throughout his career. In “Ri Taobh Linne Shlèite” (Beside the Sound of Sleat), originally published in Fax (1996), he writes: Choisich mi san uisge Ri taobh Linne Shlèite Nuair a dh’fhalbh thu san oidhche ’S dh’fhidir mi ’n t-uisge-stiùireach Is gun lorg idir air an t-soitheach A dh’fhag thall bhuam e, 2 Ailbhe Darcy, “The New Irish Diaspora Poets,” The Town Crier, 7 August 2015, http:// towncrier.puritan-magazine.com/irish-diaspora/. 3 Gorman’s developed translation style – for which see his translation of “Samhail” below – deconstructs the act of translation, showing how individual words, when translated, contain many different possible routes or options. Peter Mackay 104 Sin agus a’ ghealach A’ tuiteam an cridhe na beinne, Fann, sgàinte. I walked out in the rain Beside the Sound of Sleat After you left at night And I noticed a wake But not a trace Of the vessel that left it over there And the old moon Falling in the heart of the mountain, Faint and rent.4 And “bhuam” appears at crucial points in his lockdown poems “Ri Linn Glasadh an t-Sluaigh / Over a Hundred Days of Solitude in the Highlands,” and especially “Samhail,” which I will quote at some length here: A’ tathaich air ais mun bhothan Seachad air Coill’ a’ Ghasgain Agus Abhainn an Ùird na lighe Far an robh na buachaillean rin linn ’S an doras-mòr air a ghlasadh Agus bùird is tàirnean air na h-uinneagan ’S an sanas ann: Cùm a-mach ’S e a’ tuiteam am broinn a chèile, Dh’fhairich mi bhuam crònan Is carachadh nam fiadh An lùib nam fiùran ’s nan gallan Samhail taimhslich nam bodach. Back hauntvisiting around the bothy past the woods of Gasgan and the Ord River in stagnantspate where the shepherdlads were in their generationtime and the windows nailed and boarded and a Keep Out whisperwarningsign there in it and all falling in, I feltheard over there the 4 Rody Gorman, Lorg Eile / Final Call (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2022) 10. The translations are Gorman’s own. On Irish Poets Writing in Scotland 105 purldirgelull-lowing and movement of the deer beambowbendamong the straightscionsaplingstalks apparitionlike the sound of the oldspectreboys before they come to occupy a house. Fiadh na chlosach ri taobh a’ Bhealaich Ruaidh ri taobh nam fianach-dosach the carcase of a deer beside the way at Bealach Ruadh beside the tufted deer grass5 These are not randomly chosen poems: they come first and last in Gorman’s recently published selected poems, Lorg Eile / Final Call (2022), and there is a strange – uncanny – continuity between them. In “Ri Taobh Linne Shlèite” what is “bhuam” is already absent: the boat that leaves a wake; the lover (?) who left during the night; the old moon (to be replaced by the new moon?). The pervasive sense is of absence, distance, and of a hovering between loss and longing – if saying something even as intangible as this is appropriate. In “Samhail,” meanwhile, Gorman uses the layout of his poems and translations to echo the effect of the Gaelic poetic form, crosanachd, which combines verse and prose to represent two people speaking, and with the sense that the two parts of the Gaelic “poem” – or two separate poems – are kept apart by that chunk of inter-tongued English. What happens in that pause between the poetry appears to be the death of the deer who are “haunting” the forest. What does this death signify, if anything? Who is haunting who: is the poet haunting the place, the deer haunting the poet? What is required, or no longer required, to “keep out”? Reading these poems together suggests an ongoing engagement with what is unclear or opaque, with histories that are only accessible through distant traces, “purldirgelull-lowing,” or the silent, overly evocative image of the deer carcase. Meaning is not embodied, crystallised, or solidified here, but deferred or gestured at (kept “over there” as it were, or “kept out”). This is evident in the allusion to the most famous (and perhaps elusive) Gaelic poem of the twentieth century, Somhairle MacGill-Eain’s “Hallaig,” which begins “Tha bòrd is tàirnean air an uinneag” [The window is nailed and boarded].6 “Hallaig” is concerned with the manner in which a space can be retained for the evocation of a Gaelic community cleared a hundred years earlier, the village of Hallaig on the island of Raasay: MacGill-Eain pictures the dead coming alive in the woods of Raasay, in an anthropomorphic reimagining of the trees. The epigraph suggests that “Tìm, am 5 Gorman, Lorg Eile 260. 6 Somhairle MacGill-Eain, Caoir Gheal Leumraich / White Leaping Flame: Collected Poems, ed. Emma Dymock and Christopher Whyte (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2011) 230-35. Peter Mackay 106 fiadh” [time, the deer] is in the woods of Raasay. When a deer is then shot (but not, apparently, killed) by the poet using “gunna ghaoil” [the gun of love], this suggests a desire to stop or, at least, hold back the march of time: time would hasten on the process by which the people of Raasay are forgotten. At the end of the poem its blood won’t be seen again in the woods “rim bheò” [while I live; literally “in my lifetime”]. This has quite different connotations if you take that “lifetime” to be that of the poet, the speaker, or the poem (and the “life” of a poem as continuing for as long as someone can read it). Any hope that the poem might offer for the continuity or restoration of a community on Raasay is tentative, and opaque. Gorman’s poem is blunter, but no clearer about its ultimate meaning. The deer is dead through causes unknown, and if the ending offers some connection with or afterlife in the landscape, it does so more emphatically in the English translation than the Gaelic: the clear etymology of “deergrass,” against the trace of “fiadh” in “fianach.” Responding to the most famous Gaelic poem of the twentieth century is perhaps an act of poetic bravado, and also one that raises questions about the differences between Gorman’s poetic positioning and MacGill-Eain’s (with MacGill-Eain’s deep-rooted genealogical connections to Raasay, and the community he reimagines). Gorman’s poem is also certainly haunted but is more passive, more distanced. It is not the poet’s “gun of love” (as in MacGill-Eain’s poem) that turns the deer into the deer carcase; what does, though, remains unsaid – though that the death occurs in the space between the Gaelic stanzas taken up by the English translation may itself be suggestive. This combined sense of being haunted but also distanced gives “Samhail” a dream-like, or specifically “aisling”-like, quality, but one which verges on the nightmarish as well as the visionary. The extent to which nightmare and dream combine in his approach to Scotland in particular is developed in “Aisling” from Beartan Briste (2011), which Gorman intertongues as “Dreamnightmareaislingwomanvisionpoem.” This poem begins “Alba bhuam air fàire” [“O Scotlandpinewhite farawaywanting from us”]; Scotland too is deferred or held at a distance, in other words; the dream-like version of the nation suggested by the “aisling” genre is one that is here a site of longing but also distance (that “farawaywanting”).7 This is again a poem that perhaps needs to be read alongside another, this time one of Gorman’s own from the same collection, “Dol a Laighe” (Sinking). Looking up from his desk, the poet sees the sunset out the window and has a curtailed vision: 7 Gorman, Lorg Eile 161. On Irish Poets Writing in Scotland 107 siud nam fhianais Air èiginn carraig No ’s dòcha gur e th’ agam eilean beag A’ gobadh a-mach às an linne Nach nochd ach ainneamh Ainneamh nuair a bhuaileas An solus ud ball àraidh Ri dealachadh-nan-tràth Fada bhuainn air fàire. There in witnesspresence just about is a cockroachknotheadlandrock or maybe a youngwee island gobsticking out of the centurysound that appears only rarely when that moon phaseknowledgelight hits a particular peniscablebowlspot at onceearlyprayermeanpartingtime farawaywanting from us on the horizon-ridge.8 Gorman’s islands, in other words, are always sinking beyond reach, his aislings are always dissipating, rather than concretizing. His intertonguings enact this, especially in that most recent incarnation in which normal script and italics, indentations and stanzaic patterns jostle together. Eric Falci has persuasively argued that in Irish and Scottish Gaelic poems published with en face English translations the “poem” – even for speakers of those languages – consists of an act of reading in the “gutter” between the two texts, as the reader’s eye scans across to the English for help with any unusual or unknown words, or complex images.9 A poem like “Samhail” complicates this reading experience further; reading this poem, one no longer looks for the “text” in the gutter, but in the various runnels rushing between the blocks of language. Such dislocations and unfootings are no surprise. In the early-ish Irishlanguage poem “Oileán” (Island) from An Duilleog Agus an Crotal / The Leaf and the Lichen (2004) Gorman has two islands, two “homes,” separated by time as well as distance. One is associated with a public literary life: “I gcuideachta Seamus Heaney, / Margaret Atwood is Derek Walcott / Agus neach as Críoch Lochlainn / Ag féile thiar / I mBaile Átha Cliath mo dhúchais.” [In the company of Seamus Heaney, / Margaret Attwood and Derek Walcott / And some old geezer from Iceland / At a reading held / At home in Dublin.]10 The other is “an oileán / Ina 8 Gorman, Lorg Eile 143. 9 Eric Falci, “Reading in the Gutters,” Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry, ed. Peter Mackay, Edna Longley, and Fran Brearton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 161-75. 10 Gorman, Lorg Eile 74-75. Peter Mackay 108 bhfuil cónaí orm ó shin.” [the island / Where I’ve made my home.] Returning there, waiting for him on the floor by the door “Beidh Scotland on Sunday / Agus an Independent, / Lá ar gcúl beirt.” [Will be a copy of Scotland on Sunday / And one of The Independent / Both a day behind.] The slightly throwaway world of international literature festivals – those random connections between writers, that “some old geezer” – is contrasted with the different timescale of Skye. But to what end? To emphasise the difference between the Irish ways of describing belonging: “mo dhúchais,” as against somewhere “ina bhfuil cónaí orm”? To suggest the fetishization of that which is out of time, the day behind? To hint at the delayed relationship to “independence” in both places? Or simply to evoke an uneasy – or comfortable – inhabiting of different worlds? If there is a self-conscious namedropping here (both of the poets and the newspapers), there is also a sense of mutual misunderstanding between those worlds: it is unclear what is actually being crossed on the bridge back from Kyle of Lochalsh to Skye, “an ghrian / Ag dul faoi, na faoileáin ag faí go hard” [the sun / Setting, the gulls looking down].11 In an earlier Irish poem, “Cumarsáid” (Communication) from Bealach Garbh (1999), all that can be understood is a paradoxical fluency of misunderstanding: “Nach maith a thuigim as do chaint / Go bhfuil muid líofa beirt / I dteanga nach dtuigeann muid i gceart” [I understand clearly / From what you have to say / That we’re fluent, both of us, / In a language neither understands].12 If each poet is an island, a repository of an individual language, there is no hope of building a bridge between them, no matter the skills of the translator. This sketch aligns Gorman’s work with the frequent position of the exile poet: between two worlds, languages, understandings of the world, alienated from both and – in the process – from the past and the present, in a reality that is intangible or slippery: the world could be seen to be sinking “bhuam” at all points. This is not the whole story, however. Another touchstone for Gorman is the example of the mad king Sweeney from Buile Shuibhne, who offers a model of the Irish poet / singer / birdman flitting back and forth between these islands (and their tree-tops), belonging everywhere and nowhere. In the original story Sweeney, driven mad and turned into a bird-like creature by the curse of St Ronan Finn, wanders the treetops of Ireland, Scotland, and Western England. Gorman has engaged in multiple, multilingual reworkings of Buile Shuibhne, which are due to be published later this year, but Sweeney is also a figure who has been quite widely explored by recent Irish poets: Seamus Heaney for one made use of the story to connect the different islands in the midst of the Troubles in Sweeney Astray (1983) and Station 11 Gorman, Lorg Eile 74-75. 12 Gorman, Lorg Eile 38. On Irish Poets Writing in Scotland 109 Island (1984). Sweeney is a complex character to adopt, and not one reducible to any questions of belonging to or dislocation from particular locales, communities, religions, or regions; there is an otherness to Sweeney that brings into question the borders between humans and other creatures, with the possibility of the dissolution of the human into an entirely different species, or indeed genus. The malleability of Sweeney – with the potential to be liberating as well as nightmarish – is perhaps what makes him attractive to the Derry poet Eoghan Walls, who now lives in the north of England, and who wrote his second collection, Pigeon Songs (2019), while living in Carnoustie, on the North Sea coast of Scotland.13 Walls, Sweeney-like, has been peripatetic around these islands. Originally from Derry and having completed a PhD at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast, he has lived in Laytown in the Republic of Ireland, Carnoustie, and now outside Lancaster: he is published, though, by the Welsh press Seren. Pigeon Songs is one of the more extreme versions of aviphilia, or love of and identification with birds: it is half written from the perspective of pigeons and perhaps inevitably includes the unhomed Sweeney in the poem “Sweeney’s Song.” Walls’s work often revolves around the corporeal, and how fatherhood affects his relationship to his own body and its transformations. (I should hesitate to say “his own” since the lyric “I” in his work, as here, includes the non-human as well as the human, and at times comedic, at times grotesque, transfigured versions of the “poet.”) “Sweeney’s Song” stages an uneasy dislocation from the self, from the “here”: Last night I dreamt I had a second penis, a nestling chick. I knew it was the baby’s. Though I knew it was going to leave us and slowly get reabsorbed into my body, 13 Sweeney is a more attractive model for male than female poets; there might, though, be something of Sweeney in the poem “Do not alight here again” by Rachel McCrum, who is from Donaghadee in County Down, lived in Edinburgh for much of the 2010s, although she has since moved to Montreal (her first collection, First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate, takes its title – as a challenge – from John Knox). In “Do not alight here again,” she writes ambivalently of “the Mainland / where we were always supposed to end up” and implores at the end: “Get out. / Leave while you can. […] Wander far. / Be better than us. // Do not alight here again.” Rachel McCrum, First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate (Edinburgh: Stewed Rhubarb Press, 2018) 9. Why stop after one dislocation, one upheaval when one can – like Sweeney – continue wandering and alighting? Peter Mackay 116 despite the violence in the world imagined here, a faith in transformative power; there is the sense that the life of the four lads as dolphins, scooting off for Belfast Lough, is now actually better. This may also be crediting poetry (that “weird hoo-hoo-hoo”) with the ability to transform, to improve; and it may hold that the world itself is generally pervaded, or haunted, by benign spirits (at least as a counterbalance to the violence of humanity). The sense of possible benignity persists in the few poems Gillis has located in Scotland. “On Blackford Hill,” for example, stages a meeting with an old man on a park bench, there to remember walks with his wife who he now visits in “Cairdean House” (“Cairdean” being the Gaelic for “friends”). Up the hill, he says, “You’ve more interest / in angels,” and the man he encounters may himself be an angel. When they part, the poet says: I bid him the best, and as I walk into the empty space before me, the here of the air, it shifts over there, ghosting everywhere and nowhere, layer upon layer of nothing distinct. […] On Blackford Hill’s slopes, ice and ozone, I breathe in the air and because it is not human, breathe out.31 There is a level of self-possession here – if not possession of place – that was missing from his earlier poems set in Edinburgh, where he himself becomes that ghostly spirit. In “Nostalgia,” for example, from the earlier collection Scapegoat (2014), the poet remembers how “I too lived somewhere. Life had shape / I dream of now: journals and Schweppes, / candles stubbed in empty bottles of wine” and works up to the realisation of “how / imperceptibly we perceive it’s too late / to be free, get a grip, give life shape.”32 At the end of “No. 8” from the same collection, it becomes clear that the bus the poet is on is in Edinburgh (until its arrival “onto North Bridge” there was nothing located about it otherwise), and the sudden discovery that the poem is evoking a particular place and time doesn’t bring rootedness but a sense of temporariness: 31 Gillis, The Readiness 24-25. 32 Alan Gillis, Scapegoat (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 2014) 47. Emphasis added. On Irish Poets Writing in Scotland 117 Sometimes I feel like a feather swept this-a-way lifting that-a-way through the heavens of my time and place here on earth while nonetheless sitting on a bus.33 Fate is accepted here, even if that is just the fatedness of bus routes. The feather being “swept this-a-way lifting / that-a-way” has the air, once more, of the scattered Sweeney blown off course and ended up in Scotland by chance. That “chance” might, of course, be ill-fated: in the title poem “Scapegoat,” Scotland is the unwelcome – and then only – option for McCandless, on the run after his first, failed job as a getaway driver. “Ah could go tah fucking Scotland” becomes “Spread out and look, / one says. Another asks, what for? / If he’s smart he’s in Scotland.”34 By “On Blackford Hill,” though, the sense of “nothingness” (that “layer upon layer of nothing distinct”) can nonetheless be countered by the salutary meeting with the human and the non-human. Questions of denomination and background, which will inflect Irish poets’ relationships with Scotland, are pertinent here. A Catholic getaway driver would be more likely to head to “fucking Dublin” than “fucking Scotland.” McCandless’s options are shaped by his upbringing and (nominal) religion: free will is perhaps always circumscribed in different ways; not everyone’s fates have the same shape. A similar sense of the lack of free will (and the inevitability, for all its apparent skittishness, of fate) characterises the work of Miriam Gamble, a Brussels-born and Belfast-raised poet who is a friend and colleague of Gillis’s at Edinburgh, who did her PhD alongside Eoghan Walls at Queen’s University Belfast (the poetry world is, after all, very small), and who has lived in Scotland since 2010. “The Canal at Fountainbridge,” from her third book What Planet (2019), depicts a post-industrial world of dispossession in which: The water doesn’t flow one way or the other of its own imperative, but takes direction from the wind; it turns back on itself when it counters the lock, peppered moth cut loose from the products of industry […]35 33 Gillis, Scapegoat 34. 34 Gillis, Scapegoat 65, 67. 35 Miriam Gamble, What Planet (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2019) 50. Peter Mackay 118 The peppered moth is used as an example for the teaching of evolution to show directional colour change: dark-coloured moths became more prevalent during the industrial revolution; light-coloured moths once air pollution had cleared. Unlike the peppered moth, the poet is resistant to the pressure to be shaped by your immediate environment. The poem ends with an almost nightmarish image of an over-landscaped canal side: Here is the scurf of the past, the clean scalp of the future. Here is a landscape like the head of an orator, meticulously shuffling through its show of slides – what is to be kept, and what forgotten, and in what order.36 In “Maighdean-Mara,” a poem in her previous collection Pirate Music (2014), there had been a defiant – and erotic – positioning of herself in terms of Scotland: “Give me your tongue, Scotland. / I’ll meet you eye to eye […] I would sing, and I would stand.”37 By “The Canal at Fountainbridge,” though, this has become tempered by a wariness of being erased, of being consumed and broken: “And here is your own small past, / abstracted from it in a box / others will smash and squeeze.”38 What Planet ends with (more) “Moths” and the realisation that her language too has evolved to include Scottish words and pronunciations: “Something changed when I wasn’t looking: / gies and cannae came like moths to test their wings / on the filament of my tongue.”39 One might, in other words, also become overwhelmed by one’s environment, one’s voice and distinctive speech “nearly” merging invisibly into a background: “I am hovering in stonewash blue, I am stamped / on the image like a pale moth on a pale tree, / a white crow on a field of white, or nearly.”40 Like Gillis’s work, Gamble’s often reimagines Northern Ireland rather than Scotland as its immediate territory (when it has a specific “territory”), in returns 36 Gamble, What Planet 51. 37 Miriam Gamble, Pirate Music (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2014) 33. 38 Gamble, What Planet, 51. 39 Gamble, What Planet 74. 40 Gamble, What Planet 74. On Irish Poets Writing in Scotland 119 to childhood, to the suburbs, to “Betty Staff’s,” her grandmother’s dance hall in Belfast. If the title What Planet (no question mark) is in part a questioning of place, it is one that does not want to reconcile geographical differences so much as highlight them: in a footnote in this collection she describes how in a collaboration with Nerys Williams they were “interested in attempting to explore displacement without nostalgia.”41 Her poetry holds together different experiences and places – Siete Lagunas in the Sierra Nevada in Andalucía, the “Abandoned Asylum” of Craiglockhart, the distorted through-the-looking-glass political realm of “Wonderland” – to see how they overlap or overlay one another or (crucially) don’t, and how one can maintain identity and a sense of self even when transported and transposed. In “Moths” body overlays place, not vice versa: “In your painting of the Old Man of Storr / the diaphanous scrim of my breasts overlays him.”42 The poem suggests, though, that it may only be the power of art, and acts of reimagining, that allows this perspective: one in which self and body remain the determining features, and in which location (and even a sense of aged patriarchal definition) fades into the background. Selfhood, in Gamble’s poems, is an act of will, in other words, against conditions – in Scotland or otherwise – that would render you identical, homogenous, with the world around you, or choose for you – with the “clean scalp of history” what is to be remembered and retained. Questions of what is foreground and what is background might be even more pressing when dislocation and doubleness are a matter of birth rather than choice. Born and bred in Scotland, Niall O’Gallagher has quite a different relationship to “Irishness” and “Scottishness” to the other poets discussed here: the doubleness – the “twinning” Wheatley engages in – was not something necessarily chosen, although by learning Scottish Gaelic in adulthood O’Gallagher developed his own way of addressing it. This is not to say that there is in any way a singular or unitary “Irishness” experienced by poets raised in different denominations and religions in Dublin, Belfast, Greystones, Derry, and Newtownards. However, the tensions between “being” Scottish and Irish were something O’Gallagher was born into, and being part of an established Irish community in central Scotland and so being subject to the particular Scottish flavour of sectarianism is something he has had to negotiate in ways the other poets have not. The result is an individual plotting of different cultural affiliations and attractions, careful not to be bound by the entrenched positions of Scotland, or the established Irish community in Scotland. His poetry reworks a familial connection with Ireland – in particular with Tír Chonaill – at the level of formal structure and poetic positioning. He makes 41 Gamble, What Planet 79. 42 Gamble, What Planet 74. Peter Mackay 120 common use of aicill rhyme (this has supplanted earlier explorations of the Petrarchan sonnet to become his most common poetic approach), and has epigraphs from Tochmarc Étaíne, and from the poems of Carolan and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (as well as Dante, Ovid, Josep Carner, Catullus, and others). Nevertheless, he remains suspicious of the myths of self that often come with Scottishness, or with secondor third-generation Irishness. On the one hand, having spent years in Govanhill in Glasgow, O’Gallagher is rightly wary of Scotland’s view of itself as welcoming to the world. In “Sràid Westmoreland,” for example, he criticises “na breugan a dh’ innseas dhuinn mur dheidhinn / fhèin” [the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves]: that every immigrant will be welcomed into a “baile far a bheil blàthas, bòidhchead ’s beartas” [warmth, beauty and wealth], when in fact they encounter closes “a tha fosgailt don tìde is an dìle / a’ sìor dhòrtadh mar dheuran dhaoine cloinne” [that are open to the weather and the rain endlessly falling like children’s tears].43 On the other hand, there is resistance to the tribal identities evident through the sports strips – Celtic and Donegal – on washing lines (“Lìnean-nighe”) across the Scottish central belt: “Air gach lìn tha na lèintean / ri chèile. Tha na Ceiltich / is Dún na nGall an crochadh, / ball-coise agus cleasachd // Ghàidhealach, aig an leth-chrann.” [On every line there are shirts / beside each other. Celtic and Dùn nan Gall hanging, / football and Gaelic // games, at half-mast.”]44 For all that those washing lines create a web connecting Scotland and Ireland, and past generations to the present, O’Gallagher is not part of that world, would fly by those nets, and cannot easily claim kinship with those washer-folk: “Bheirinn mo lèine uaine / ’s gheal bhuam is a thoirt thuca, / ach a dh’aindeoin gach ceangail / a th’ eadarainn, chan urrainn.” [I’d take off my green / and white shirt to give it them, / but despite each link there is / between us, I can’t.] 45 Connection – and meaning – do not come for O’Gallagher through engrained tribal identity, but through personal acts of piety and celebration. He remembers his grandmother failing to convince nuns in Ireland to pray for a friend who had died fighting against Franco, and offers his own poem up instead.46 Having not had songs passed down to him by his Irish-speaking father, he celebrates instead – in “O nach d'fhuair mi na h-òrain” (Since I Didn’t Get the Songs) – his grandfather’s 43 Niall O’Gallagher, Beatha Ùr (Inverness: Clàr, 2013) 38. My translation. 44 Niall O’Gallagher, Suain Nan Trì Latha (Inverness: Clàr, 2016) 42. My translation, published in Niall O’Gallagher, Fuaimean Gràidh / Sounds of Love (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2023) 131. 45 O’Gallagher, Suain Nan Trì Latha 42; O’Gallagher, Fuaimean Gràidh 131-32. 46 O’Gallagher, Beatha Ùr 35. On Irish Poets Writing in Scotland 121 house in Donegal: “Aig taigh mo sheanair chuala / sinn gach duan, facal is fonn / den chànain is na fuaimean / a bu dual dhuinn, ciall is conn.” [At my grandfather’s house we heard each poem, word and tune of the language and the sounds that were our heritage, meaning and sense.]47 He celebrates the way he too is involved in passing this heritage down to another “unexpected” generation: “Oir cluinnear / port gach fuinn le mo mhac òg / bha dùil nach cluinneadh tuilleadh, / na ghuileig fhèin ’s mi ga phòg / gach oidhche.” [Because the tune of each song will be heard by my young son – that we thought would not be heard again – in his gurgles as I kiss him each night.]48 And – as Rody Gorman had before him – O’Gallagher celebrates Edward Dwelly, the great lexicographer, and his dictionary, with its words known on both sides of the Sea of Moyle, as a symbol for the continued vibrancy of a language blooming in spite of it all, in a poem for the Gaelic League Glasgow, Conradh na Gaeilge Glaschú “1895-2020”: Ach lìon Eideard Dwelly gach duilleag de dh’fhaclair-san, na aibideil chraoibh’, le faclan a chluinnte air gach taobh Shruth na Maoile ’s a thug gu cuimhne nam fògarrach na dh”fhàg iad – duilleach nan crann-daraich, fuinn nan òran caomh’, ceòl binn nan eun anns a’ choille chaoil – ’s a shaoil iad nach cluinnte leò tuilleadh. Ach cluinnear fhathast i an Cnoc a’ Ghobhainn, A’ cothlamadh nan connrag is nam foghar le cainnt choigrich nan innseachan air gach sràid; agus am beul nam pàistean tha an teanga nach d’fhuair bàs an achlais a peathar ach tha beò am measg nan geugan seo fo bhlàth.49 But Edward Dwelly persevered, filled every page of his dictionary – the leaves of this alphabet of trees – with words heard still on both sides of the Sea of Moyle, words 47 O’Gallagher, Beatha Ùr 34. My translation. 48 O’Gallagher, Beatha Ùr 35. 49 O’Gallagher, Fo bhlàth (Inverness: Clàr, 2020) 44. Peter Mackay 122 that brought memories to mind, of melodies of songs, of leafy oaks, of the sweet singing of birds in a wood, words the Irish in exile feared they would never hear again. Yet still in Govanhill these words are heard on every street, their consonants and vowels mingling with the foreign languages of India, and on the tongues of the children, the language that didn’t die in her sister’s arms is still alive amidst the branches of this flourishing tree.50 There is hope, in O’Gallagher’s poems, that not only the language in exile but the poet in a rooted exile might not only persevere but also flourish. But with this flourishing (perhaps necessarily) comes transformation: this is a poem in Scottish Gaelic rather than Irish, after all. If the language is being spoken in the treetops, it has – like Sweeney – been irrevocably changed. Whether the changing of one’s tongue, the transformation of oneself, is a price that each of the poets discussed here would think is worth paying is a different matter: this, befitting a celebration of a lexicographer, might be an overly optimistic view of the metamorphic resistance of language in the abstract. 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