Disappearance: North Sea Poems

Lesley Harrison
Shearsman

As its subtitle suggests, Lesley Harrison’s first full-length collection coheres around what can sometimes seem, to the person standing on the shore, a great empty space. Though Scotland is her starting point, the coordinates mapped out in this inventive and exciting book are anything but narrowly national. Instead, the poet offers a series of nuanced considerations of the way that a shared marine geography has shaped and continues to connect a plethora of places and cultures.

The opening poem, ‘Birds of the North Sea’, offers the birds’ names as they change on their migratory routes north. Here is the golden plover, which when read out loud as Harrison suggests it should be, sounds to me like a phrase from a song:

weeo—hjejle—ló—heilo

A counterpart poem later in the volume, ‘Birds of Angus’, draws on an 1813 work by the Rev. James Headrick, Minister of Dunichen, titled The Agriculture of Angus or Forfarshire, giving the Latin and vernacular names of each species. It pleased me to reflect that, even in the title of her source text, there’s a revealing indeterminacy in Headrick’s referring to Angus or Forfarshire.

Among the strengths of this collection is its sustained use of other texts, making new meaning out of existing writing. For instance, ‘Orkney Road Trip with Samuel Beckett’ reproduces extracts from that writer’s Texts for Nothing in light grey, with sparse fragments blacked out into a ragged skein of verse. The reader is left with options and can navigate as they see fit between Beckett’s grey prose subtext and the darker islets of poetry which Harrison finds within it.

One paradox of this book—and maybe the idea of northern-ness more generally—is the way it accommodates and communicates such vast perspectives and distances, alongside an attentiveness to small intimacies and minimalia.

Perhaps when one is confronted with such enormities of geographical scale, it’s best to focus on the little things, ordinarily half-seen or disregarded entirely—the raindrops falling and the molecules escaping the mountain. Or, closer to home in the book’s final poem ‘Burnhead’, the Mawse Burn in Dundee, which like Glasgow’s Molendinar runs on in the dark beneath the city’s stone and concrete, ‘a cool current in a room; a line where we hold hands, and step over.’

I greatly enjoyed this book, whose title poem refers to the disappearance of Donald Crowhurst as he attempted to single-handedly sail around the globe in the late 1960s. Moreover, in the shadow of that vanishing lurk other disappearances—cultural and ecological—whose implications haunt Harrison’s poems of heftedness and northerly migration.

—Stewart Sanderson