PERHAPS the ideal reader of this collection might be a boy aged between eight and 12 were he to plug his ears occasionally to the language of adults. Michael Pedersen majors in boyhood memories.
There’s dubious daring-do – feats of crazed courage, like cycling through train tunnels – and other boyhood lunacies as with the title work and its tale of pretending to be a feisty feline.
Then there are the boyhood schemes, the fear of a slagging, the nightmarish humiliation of severe constipation at primary school.
The recapitulation of such trauma and joy is Pedersen’s forte. His tone is often ludic, sometimes frankly antic, but his work is regularly haunted by loss – the loss of friends, the loss of time – and the stark loneliness of understanding (as the title of one poem has it) that We Are Other People to Other People. How even your dad can be a stranger.
The geography here is widely scattered (we visit Northern Ireland, Galway, South Africa, Italy – Greenland even) but this is a very Scottish get-together. We find ourselves in Edinburgh again and again, the scenes of Pedersen’s childhood – Samson’s Ribs, Duddingston Loch, Holyrood Park.
His language is resolutely Scottish and revels in words like feardie, chorie and scoobie: an unapologetic dictionary of Portobello patter.
This all brewed up with a love of rare usages – elsewhere we get sproftacchel, contrapposto, philtrum. Then there’s his own coinages, with unfudged and unfudgeable being the most hilarious.
Pedersen’s senses work overtime – his eyes catch the contractions of his uncle’s biceps in a Popeye gesture. Later we see the aurora borealis with its “electric seaweed ribbons of emerald and amethyst”. He hears the crash of Cockenzie Power Station being demolished. He has us enjoy the taste of a breakfast roll – one to die for, stuffed with square sausage, black pudding, haggis and much, much more. Later we retch with the reek of a ragworm.
He revels in touch more than any other organ of perception. Pedersen is a haptic poet: note his naughty but nice celebration of feel in Birds And Blowies, and, elsewhere, the refreshing sensation of rain on the face, the discomforting squelch of sodden socks after a soaking.
This must be the most pluvial of poetry collections in some time; it rains a lot in Pedersen’s universe. There are storms, donner und blitzen, “thunderclap, hail – a rampage of lightsabres and electric wire”, as it lashes down, “needle-nasty”.
There’s more water in one of the saddest works, Queensferry’s Lost Not Found, an elegy for Scott Hutchison of the band Frightened Rabbit.
Pedersen has his drowned friend transformed, as with Ariel’s song from The Tempest, that sees Scott undergoing a sea change into something rich and strange with “limbs in seaweed stookies – in your pocket two jostling crabs”.
Pedersen’s mourning here acts as an accompaniment to Boyfriends, his tangy memoir of his friendship with Hutchison. We hear of their texts after Scott’s father died, then Pedersen’s own feelings of grief in a bravura display of eight stanzas, eight extended similes.
But Pedersen is alert to the risks of sentimentality, begging we be spared “insipid nostalgia”.
He knows we are seduced by sweetness, sugary sticks of rock, as with the softness of the Edinburgh variety melting on the tongue. His poems tell us life is more likely to serve up the Brighton kind: hard and full of shards. Difficult to swallow.
But he has a hedgehog’s sense of self-preservation: he won’t read a bad review by the “forensic wit” who disses his poems, “then anoints himself for having the gall to do so”. One-nil!
In contrast this reviewer wonders, like Fyodor from Nabokov’s The Gift, what compels Pedersen to compose poems about his childhood? Because he’s a real poet. This is what they do.
You sense he, like Fyodor, plots his modulations, rejects tongue stumbling, loves “lyrical rollers”, collects “rhyme-clusters, rhymescapes”.
And Pedersen, like Fyodor, is acutely alert to critical laziness, as with the artless use of quotation to draw incorrect conclusions and dreary lists of what the poet “likes” or “dreads” or “finds solace in”. I want to plead not guilty…
What else should we take away from Pedersen’s latest?
Don’t grow up a snob. Don’t lose your accent.
