In his latest collection of poetry, Bad Shaman Blues, W.N. Herbert extends his reputation as a master versifier with technically superb poems that enact a circus of language on the page. The poems journey from the borderland of Hadrian’s Wall to Siberia, China, Greece, and back to Scotland, all the time interweaving landscapes and textures of mind, place, and history with observations both existential and comic.
The first poem of the book, ‘Farewell to La Gazetta’, sets the tone and agenda for what follows. Here, Herbert sounds a comic funeral call to the machismo of youthful masculinity.
While you cling to your thirties you’re deluded,
you’re linked to ageing gods: those goods
with seasons still to play: Signori, Zola…
He insists that one should then,
…Greet those forties
with fortitude, or greet and snort.
He bids adieu to the Italian footballers, those whose careers mirrored the pinnacle and decline of his own youth.
We are left to: ‘Say farewell to all pretence at manhood’
‘Farewell to your surprising young erections’
and ‘board the bastard fitness bike’
The poem’s mock-heroic sense is heightened by its tight form and metrical structure. Sometimes Herbert’s poetic frameworks are so perfect that you think he’s just showing off (and maybe he is).
Herbert also obsessively takes the micky out on William McGonagall, one of Scotland’s most dubious historic bards. A fine example of his humour aimed at McGonagall is ‘Ode to the “New” Tay Bridge’. In the opening lines of the poem, Herbert tells us,
Twas in the clammy autumn of 2003
I was commissioned by some madmen at the BBC
to write aboot you, rickety auld Tay railbridge
(a prospect as cheery as inhabiting a fridge)
He continues, while focusing his barbs alternately at the bridge and at McGonagall,
While Isambard build iron boats the same size as the ocean
McGonagall wrote rusty verse of abyssal proportion
devoted tae catastrophe domestic or abroad—
nae massacre or forest fire this man wad not applaud.
Here, as elsewhere, Herbert reminds us of the power of poetry to delight: the joy in a well-turned phrase, the magic of a clattering of sounds clicking shut in a perfect rhyme. Herbert’s poetry grounds itself dominantly in the ear. His musicality vivifies the poems.
At times, however, Herbert’s virtues, a musical ear and a penchant for tight poetic form, also become his downfall. A number of poems in the collection that are technically superb, wilt on the page. The major weakness of Bad Shaman Blues is this inclusion of a significant number of weaker poems. Perhaps here, Herbert’s strength at the formal elements of poetry results in well-made but lifeless poems being included in the collection. The reader gets the feeling that these poems were merely exercises in form, with little significant or even interesting content to drive them. Touted on the back cover as ‘the antithesis of the slim volume’, the book would be better off, and therefore the reader’s experience of it, had more of the fat been trimmed prior to publication.
Even still, Bad Shaman Blues abounds with poetic gems. In ‘Over the Wall’, the narrator meditates on the meaning of Hadrian’s Wall. He notices nature’s distinguishing marks, which the wall demarcates, alongside the cultural divide that the ‘unguarded Wall’ has also come to denote,
glancing north to where in autumn and in evening
the light begins to strip the local greens away
in favour of a brittle ochre hue—
you start to feel the Romans got the border right.
Perhaps the best poem of the book is Herbert’s elegy, ‘For Andrew Waterhouse’, written for a friend that took his own life. Herbert conveys a sense of loss and love that is absolutely palpable. He addresses his friend directly in the poem. In one stanza, Herbert insists,
But what I mourn here more’s the friend
who died so friendless,
for no one could prevent that end
but you, displaced completely from
our love, your art—you needed numb-
ness to be endless.
In the midst of this poem we stumble on a stanza that in many ways reveals Herbert’s gift to the poetry world, his major concern and approach to the craft. He contends,
Displacement is our theme of themes,
it's what remains:
the way we can’t remember dreams
that still, like partial songs, affect
the unmelodic intellect
and tune our brains.
Throughout this collection Herbert moves between Scots and English, tending to use either one or the other idiom within individual poems. In each idiom Herbert speaks out of different emotional registers. In Scots he often achieves a controlled mania—humour and the blues commingled. Here his poetry tends toward a certain Chaucer-esque, bawdy, burlesque feel. The perspective of these poems is often lively, placing you in the midst of the action. In his strictly English idiom poems, the tone tends to be more staid and have an observer’s perspective. For me, some of Herbert’s best poems happen where this bifurcation of idioms is not so stark, as in the ‘Tay Bridge’ poem mentioned earlier.
Bad Shaman Blues is definitely a trip worth taking. Herbert delights and challenges, looks at life through a wry, definitely Scottish eye, and considers the meaning of it all. Like the shaman on the cover, you end the book banging on the drum with ‘Willie’, alternately screaming at the sky and laughing from the depths of your guts. At the end of the day, W.N. Herbert has given us a significant work of poetry that deserves to be read.
Also read, Stuart Kelly's review of this book from the March 26th edition of 'The Scotsman on Sunday'.
Donovan McAbee is a PhD student in the School of English at the University of St Andrews and editor of the Poetry House online magazine.
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