The Silver of Old Mirrors
Roderick Watson is one of the most respected and well-liked figures in contemporary Scottish literature. As a critic and literary historian, as a champion of Hugh MacDiarmid and Nan Shepherd, as the author of The Literature of Scotland, first published in 1984 and since revised in two volumes, his work was pioneering and stands brilliantly well across decades: fair-minded, even-handed, comprehensive and well-balanced.
As a poet, his work has sustained itself with equally careful balance, gentle good humour, cultural inclusiveness and a characteristic priority of enquiry and inquisitiveness. His previous poetry books, True History on the Walls (1976) and Into the Blue Wavelengths (2004), lead us towards this new work, The Silver of Old Mirrors, establishing a parallel continuity of purpose with his critical work, both characteristically clear in articulation and tone. His verse is an independent voice, beautifully poised and sharply pitched.
‘Old men ought to be explorers’ wrote T.S. Eliot. ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing,’ W.B. Yeats tells us. And Dylan Thomas exhorts us, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’ Watson is certainly an explorer but not an exploiter or reckless adventurer. There is nothing ‘paltry’ about him or his late poetry. And if, like all of us, he’s heading towards a long goodnight, his poems assure us that there is indeed every reason to go gently. It’s a quality of gentleness, combined with a lasting strength, that sustains all these poems.
They can be wistful, poignant, fond recollections of past moments, youth’s enchantments, lasting love and the freedom that comes with commitment, but there is nothing merely sentimental or nostalgic about them. They are each of them high tensile constructs and their author is clearly aware of the provisional and partial sense of his own presence in the poems and the world. There is a pervasive quality of character, a sensibility, rather than any dramatic self-portraiture. If this gives the poems a feeling of tentative, sensitive appreciation, they are equally achieved, firm, articulate iterations of linguistic energy intrinsically of a more mature nature than the energy of youth. And so much the better for that. They are, each one, carefully made works of art, the poems of a ‘makar’, to use that valuable word.
In age, or simply seniority, there’s a distinction of character that is not to be confused with the effusiveness of energy unleashed by the indiscriminate young. In our times, we honour it less and we undervalue it to our cost. Our culture sells youth as glamour and neglects difficult wisdom and deep experience. So much is given to fashion, sensation and polarized, uninformed opinion. What we have here, however, is deeply and broadly well-informed.
The poems show us that they know what they’re doing, profoundly, but they never give you the sense that they’ve been pre-cooked. You follow them with the immediacy demanded of a ‘work-in-progress’. This gives them the immediacy of a youthful disposition. And that’s life while we have it, all the way: something to be true to, and Watson is as honest, accurate and true to it, as his mentors, MacDiarmid and Shepherd, were in their own work.
The first section is entitled ‘the spinning place’. It reminds me of what happens sometimes in Sibelius’s later symphonies, when the music seems to hover, circle itself, holding still while at the same time moving forward inexorably, under its shimmering surface. The poems take you to a dream city, where you are lost in ‘cobbled lanes / and shadowed doors’: ‘the real dream is the dream / of memory itself’. In ‘An Ordinary Day’ (subtitled ‘Ten Steps to Success on the Saxophone’) we read: The tone they say / is everything’ and the ambiguity of those words applies equally to playing the instrument, the acts of ‘scanning old photographs on the screen’ and realizing what it means to be ‘No longer a boy.’
The poems accumulate a poise in their character, juxtaposing the Forth at Stirling, the shores of the Mediterranean, the salt in the air of Skye, the images of past, present and continuous. In the second section ‘bursting into light’, there are portraits, family mementos, comic, boisterous, poignant snapshots. In the third, ‘these sudden returns’, there are meditations, reflections, musings, never ponderous, but thoughtful in the best sense, drawing from Greek mythological figures, Orpheus, Eurydice, to bring old truths to particular application. A memory of the beloved encapsulates itself in the closing line of ‘At the Bridge’:
The river’s roar. The salmon falls. The green shirt she wore.
If the poems themselves are made of things their author returns to, gainfully, we shall do the same with the poems themselves. They’re made to last, to return to, to keep giving. And they do.
(The Silver of Old Mirrors is published by The Voyage Out Press)