A River to Take With You

by Zack Wilson

A review of ‘Shellfish & Umbrellas’ by Steven J Porter

 

Water colour snapshots of Scotland and Spain, echoes of mountains and cranes, mist, rivers, women and tired mornings, “a tongue that moves in Spanish, even hesitant Catlan” – a first reading of this excellent chapbook of poems by Steven Porter, a Scotsman in voluntary exile in Spain, left me with these impressions, rich with the kind of opaque clarity and creeping insight that the best poetry brings.

 

Scotland has a strong tradition of exiles. Exiles who seem to spend most of their time missing their homeland, a nation of diaspora, a nation and a people that finds echoes of itself across the world, and it this feeling that Porter often brings to his work. The kind of sad melancholy of a traveller in a strange land, singing songs after a glass or two, finding echoes of himself and his country’s struggles, contradictions and faults in Catalonia and Galicia, countries like Scotland that find themselves swallowed by a larger neighbour, subsumed into a southern-centred mass in the eyes of the world, with only insiders perceiving the differences that are so clear to those that know.

 

Those that don’t, Porter perceives as passers-by, the hikers and tourists journeying alongside him from Perth to Blair Atholl, ( ‘Travelling From Perth To Blair Atholl’) taking the country at its face value, not even knowing what ‘bunnets’ are, scarcely less why the Grampians raise theirs to the skies. But knowing gives the poet no satisfaction, it’s almost as though he envies their ignorance of the symbols beneath Scotland’s heavy clouds.

 

Local nuance and cultural reference, often obscure, are Porter’s bittersweet stock-in-trade.  The speaker in these poems seems a man so aware of the significances of what he is seeing on his travels that he ceases to be an outsider, but yet never quite belongs. The links to home are always there – the fishing floats beneath the lair of the Wolf of Badenoch bringing that sense of never having left Scotland at all, and yet being acutely aware of having done so.

 

Cranes on a quayside in Vigo match those of Leith, yet one sense the writer doesn‘t quite believe his bluff implication that ‘it‘s the same wherever you go‘, he takes too much interest in the finer details for that. Mountain rain, associated freely with Scotland but not so much with Spain, washes these words off the page and into the reader’s heart, making one aware of wider significances that, like all the best poetry, become intensely personal.

 

The reader recognises himself in the mirror of the loch. There is heartbreak here, but it’s self-deprecating, a bitter sweetness (a quality that also characterises Porter’s prose, incidentally) seasoned with self-mocking humour – another quality that, however vaguely, could be ascribed as Scottish, a nation that celebrates its glorious defeats as much as its victories. Just ask Archie Gemmil about that.

 

The translations of ‘umbrella’ in ’Translating Poetry at the Edinburgh Festival’ is a further example of the absurdity that lurks and delights in its discovery on the pages of this collection – however many words you know for the thing you know you still get wet without one, especially in Scotland. Similarly, language doesn’t protect us from life, or love’s absurdities, and taking it too seriously defies its point – communication after all, not art, not really. The emphasis is on the succinct here. Words are not wasted, and, as tools, shouldn’t be.

 

There is unquestionable joy in new places too, but it is usually tempered with the realisation that any fleeting sense of arrival or peace or belonging can only be interrupted by the exile’s wanderlust – the urge that took you somewhere is also the urge that will take away. Away from Scotland, away from girls like the ones in Jack Vettriano paintings, away from everywhere in the end. Like Columbus in ‘Dia de la Hispanidad’, Porter knows that he has to return. He can’t help it, to go back to Scotland, only to leave again, because only in exile’s sweet melancholy can he find the purpose, the sense of himself. The joy of arrival tempered always by its balance weight of leaving.

 

There is also an understated rejection of the myth of unfettered freedom that travel is supposed to bring, a rejection of the American ‘beat’ vision of a globalised ‘road’ where experience is squeezed through an uncomfortable filter of old Americana. Rather, Porter adopts a much more personal delight in the local details that travel reveals. In ‘Waterford Road’ the rejection is specifically Scottish too. The narrator “studied cars for a living./ Allegros, broken Cortinas…” There is “train horn jazz on the Abderdeen railway”, but no magical illumination of faux-Buddhist dimensions, rather the narrator “was secure at the wheel of a Hillman./ Lorries crammed with shadows/ were rolling to the abattoirs.” Not only were Hillmans made in Scotland, but there’s enough of Knox and the Kirk in that momento mori of a journey to the slaughterhouse to raise a knowing nod and a wince or a smile, depending on the brand of your coat.

 

There are hints at a wider British identity too, the predilection of all the peoples of this archipelago on Europe’s western edge to talk about that certain uncertainty of their lives: the weather. There are over 60 words for rain in Gaelic, and probably just as many in Scots, after all. The speaker half-complains that he is “A weather poet, they said./ From those islands where it’s so hard/ not to mention you know what.” But that in turn leads to a further refutation of pretence and artifice, almost a rejection of the fripperies of poetry itself, when he ends the poem with a darkly wry “Shit! I am a weatherman/ trapped in a poet’s skull.”

 

There is a wistful regard for the women the poet has known as well, from the unbalanced exes who leave fish on doorsteps, to the central character of ‘A Mutiny’, who challenges the speaker to “go and see the revolution/ half price on a Monday afternoon, and whose face is rendered beautiful by the cinema screen reflections of “blind men” who “drink tequila”. Later on he sees her shopping with her new boyfriend on George Street, the revolutionary a consumer once more, “always…waving yesterday’s hand.” Change makes Porter the poet restless it seems, but he also delights in it subtle adjustments with the smallest as the most profound.

 

But this exile’s album, this little trove of sour perfections under the shells, really is something to take with you, and something to return to, something that will delight time and again, like a wet wind blowing in the scent of heather from the hills, or salt from the sea, or the shampoo scents of a girl’s hair. The delight of reminder, and the sweet pain of parting. The closing time handclasp of the everyman stranger in another strange town…

 

Take it with you. Any regrets you have will be of the kind you know you’ll enjoy.

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~ This piece was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 and was filed under Review, Writing. You can make comments on it below. ~