Tonight, I am white and full.
My surface is all curves
and craters, but you don’t mind.

Claire Askew

Ahh, a moment’s rest. A luscious lingering in sensual wordplay.  For those of us craving an escape from pernicious politicking on Planet Earth here is just the ticket.

I am the moon and you are the man on me, by Claire Askew. It is one of twenty Best Scottish Poems in the Scottish Poetry Library’s latest anthology selected and edited this time by James Naughtie.

As always there’s much to linger over in the selection. Maybe it’s the mood of the moment, but I can’t resist Claire Askew’s title. Now the poem has me hooked. And, maybe it’s not an escape at all. There’s a reassuringly earthy reality in the suggestive playfulness.

Your compass does not work here,
but you are sexy
in your spaceman suit.

Images tease, affectionately I think, with more than one meaning (telescope, compass, white dunes, high tides) yet they belong to recognisable forms and landscapes, as they also stir feelings of intimate familiarity. Poetry is not really an escape then, more a return to firmer – if sometimes bumpy – ground?

Perhaps.  The poet Bridget Minamore suggests different possibilities in her response to the reported new popularity of poetry among ‘millennials’, rejecting the idea that they are seeking clarity in a world of confusion.

and most of us
don’t ask poetry for clarity, but
for an escape / for the chance to run far,
far away from the unmistakable.

Clarity: Bridget Minamore

A Brexit bonus?

Whatever the reason, there’s a measurable surge in demand for poetry. It shows in booksales, poetry slams and pithy tweets. Follow the money. According to analysis by Nielsen Bookscan, poetry is enjoying a boom, especially among young readers. Thanks to the noxious ill wind of Brexit, it seems, there’s a paradoxically welcome fresh interest in the persuasive power of words.

“Language gets stale in politics,” says Suzanne Herbert, director of the Forward Arts Foundation, in a Guardian report.  “Words begin to lose their meaning. Poetry occupies a different space to the humdrum. It is a way of renewing what words actually mean. It offers you a different way of looking at the world.”

That way with words is tantalisingly evident in Jim Naughtie’s Best Scottish Poetry selection. Roaming through the ‘rich pasture’ of Scottish poetry led him to moments ‘in the hills or on the river, an afternoon with a lover, or an argument in a pub.’

Somehow he whittled a bewildering three hundred down to twenty old and new voices (Edwin Morgan, Kathleen Jamie, Jacob Polley among them): “Troubling or reassuring (and usually both), they help us to understand who we are.”

Was the poem complete, in feeling and form? Did that little shock from the first reading somehow persist? Most of all, could you pick up a lasting throb of authenticity?

James Naughtie, Best Scottish Poems

Sexy, playful and open-eyed

Claire Askew (described by Scottish Book Trust as rebellious and award winning) caught the editor’s eye with her open-eyed, deceptively playful awareness of the gulf between male and female.  A gulf the poet navigates with eloquent ease. Disarmingly, she also explains how her poem emerged as a curious brew of unlikely influences. That tempting title? She shamelessly borrowed it from a burlesque dancer called Julie Atlas (read about it HERE).

The ambiguities of love, sex, knowing, unknowing, darkness and light, are conveyed with seeming simplicity, a full-moon clarity of language you might expect from a young writer passionate about her work with young adults in ‘hard-to-reach’ communities. (And a provocative twist not inconsistent with her Twitter/blogger identity @OneNightStanzas.)

Even more disarmingly, she reveals her ‘physics geek boyfriend’s’ first reaction is to find fault with her ‘pseudo-scientific imagery’.

Come on, it’s not rocket science. This is seductive poetic reality. Beam us up!

I am the moon and you are the man on me

Tonight, I am white and full.
My surface is all curves
and craters, but you don’t mind.

You have travelled alone through the dark,
through the vacuum of dark;
training your hands for this task,
building imaginary engines.

This is the kind of territory you were born
to navigate. You know by heart
every treacherous route
through these white dunes;
you have drawn maps of every scar,
and you sense storms.
Your compass does not work here,
but you are sexy
in your spaceman suit.

We twirl giddily, in orbit
around the days, the months.
You are wary of my high tides –
I am your escape-pod.
A familiar world spins below,
tracked by the beam of your telescope;
we shudder at passing asteroids,
send messages home by satellite.

Tonight, I am white and full.
You are the man on me,
and I am the moon.

Claire Askew

Thanks to Claire Askew (@OneNightStanzas) for permission, swiftly and kindly tweeted, to publish her poem in full

Featured image by Fay Young: deceptively soft snow-covered Munro ‘pillows’, south east of Dalwhinnie, seemed to fit the mood.