Saltire Society Scottish Poetry Book of The Year Award Winner 2014
People want pleasure from poetry, and in Bones & Breath - this
masterly collection from Alexander Hutchison - they will find it in
many forms and registers. Power and beauty, mischief and humour.
Longer poems mix satire with tender affection. Others offer
everything from solar loops to red-throated divers. The opening
section of the book provides a scattering of poems in shorter
forms, characteristically "elegant, humourous and deft by turns" as
David Kinloch described elements of earlier work, and it contains
several striking pieces, such as "Gavia Stellata" ("smallest/and
brightest/and speckled/with stars"), a sharp catalogue of
uncustomary characters in "Tabouleh" - and the informative and
affecting "Parable of the Willow". A longer piece in several short
parts - "Camp Four" - is picked out next, where satire and wry
speculation are combined, and in a typical positive twist at the
end we get not only a hint to sort out what has gone before, but
the possibility of something "reverberant/resounding". Section 3
opens with "Out of Magma: the Moon, a Witness" a beautiful and
startling account of something that happened on the slopes of Etna
one winter recently - never to be forgotten by the observer, and
surely affecting us all. There are, too, here several poems in
Scots: building on a welcome extended in "Aye, Plenty, an Mair" in
the opening section of the book. These are riddling, droll, foul,
inventive and hilarious by turns, and the mix of native, demotic
speech and sophisticated fancy takes us up and down some strange
wynds and byways. There is also a longer sequence, "Matter and
Moisture", which sets out a view of the world - even proffering
advice - in a fashion that is mischievous, focussed and beguiling
all at once. Rounding things out in Section 3 are "Tod" - where a
fox heads with real purpose into one of the Galleries off the Mound
in Edinburgh - and "Everything" - a poem given a broad and popular
endorsement from audiences of all sorts since its creation early in
2013. Section 4 is made up of a long poem "Setting the Time Aside"
which is a tribute to and engagement with the shade of a great poet
from the last century: encountered on his home patch, quizzed and
reckoned with, sounded out and given tribute, before a memorable
and moving rapprochement. One of the features of Bones & Breath
as a collection is the range of personae - voices of birds,
creatures, a tree, for example, as well as a mixed choir of accents
and registers - and the oddest, and certainly the tiniest is saved
for last. In Section 5, "Tardigrade" a real (oh, aye) microscopic
animal sets out a description of itself in illuminating, if not
always pleasant, detail, and in addition provides an appraisal of
us: wondering, not unreasonably, how we compare and what we might
become. Since it turns out the beastie has more than an edge on us
in terms of its capacity to survive, what it recommends should not,
perhaps, be lightly dismissed. In any event, "Tardigrade" offers
scope - even vision - beyond our current perspectives.
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