All Things Shall Be Made Good – The Good Words of Poet Lachlin MacKinnon –

Scottish-born poet Lachlin MacKinnon (1956 – )

The Psalmist

When I look up
my soul is water, it
trembles beneath your breath
as the skin of a mountain pool
shakes below whistled cloud.

Where there is music
let each voice praise you,
clashing cymbals
unleash their roaring
whisper, the strings sing

at one with braided voices
of boys and girls, and let the harpist
bow her sweet
neck to the sweet burden
of an air plucked from air,

the trumpeter bray
what you have promised,
that you will move among us
to bind each wound,
that all things shall be made good.

Lachlan MacKinnon (1956 - ) from Dove, Faber & Faber, 2017

I am enjoying a fruitful time of poetry-site surfing. Finding new poets who catch my poetic ear. Now, Lachlin MacKinnon, born in Scotland and now based in Ely, England, joins Meg Day and Francesca Bell as exciting new-to-me voices discovered on- line. Author of five poetry collections and a well-known literary journalist in England, MacKinnon is said to have been deeply influenced by American poets including Robert Lowell and W.C. Williams. (See below for his tribute poem to Williams, WCW.)

What a praise poem MacKinnon crafts in The Psalmist. What a psalm of praise!  There is something light and lilting about this piece. Something authentically uplifting. Yet somehow, at its end, filled, for me, with a trembling, a questioning, vulnerability.

the trumpeter bray
what you have promised,
that you will move among us
to bind each wound,
that all things shall be made good.

How the line: what you have promised strikes a blow to my heart! And makes the praise in this poem even more real. Because I know that for so many it is not a slam dunk that God does move among us, that he will bind each wound and that all things will be made good, at least not here on planet earth. The implied faith in this stanza is arresting. But also the vulnerability I hear under its lines. An implied slight questioning in the voice: you will, won’t you do as you promised, you will make all things good?

And the music in The Psalmist caught me off guard. How much it complements the topic of the poem! Psalm as song! The Psalms are often referred to as songs and this modern psalm so embodies that musical heritage. And honours it by echoing the type of images so common in the 150 psalms in the Bible. And honours it through the musicality of the poem’s  words and lines.

The music of this:

let each voice praise you,
clashing cymbals
unleash their roaring
whisper, the strings sing

I found this next poem in the Guardian newspaper’s poem of the week feature from last year.This tribute poem to William Carlos Williams. A daring thing to in a sense go up against one of the masters! But MacKinnon pulls it off. His curious mind so evident in the poem. MacKinnon takes a two line reference to Saxifrage in a twelve line Williams poem and recreates it into something robust and layered!

WCW
 
Saxifrage, said William Carlos Williams, was his flower
because it split stone. Yesterday, in a pot, a clump of it,
weedy red petals, stems robust as peasant legs.

It would survive a summer’s rage for decking,
frost memory, meltwater gush, black August.
It wouldn’t last a weekend in the jungle,

being a flower of the far north, temperate at best.
Williams was a doctor, and he could listen to his language
for the slightest sign, like a stethoscope.
Saxum is stone, frag the root of frangere, to break.
Latin names for northern things. Ghosts of empire.
Williams had time for the patient ones, men, women, children

who hang on, who pull through, saxifrage splitting stone.

Lachlin MacKinnon from Poem of the Week, The Guardian, Sept. 20th, 2017

Such a suprise in the poem’s last line. Especially after the rather matter of fact etymological backgrounder to Saxifrage! How he makes the metaphorical leap from the stubborn and strong quality of a plant that can break rock to the kinds of people Williams profiled in his poems. Such a poetic fleshing out of both Williams and Saxifrage.

MacKinnon’s reference to William’s poem sent me scurrying to read it. What an enigmatic twelve line poem that only gets to Saxifrage in the last two lines and that also quotes one of William’s most quotable quotes: No ideas/ but in things.

A SORT OF A SONG

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

William Carlos Williams from The Wedge in The Collected Poems, new Directions,2001

After reading William’s poem about, among other things, a way of being a poet (slow and quick, sharp/ to strike) I see how MacKinnon has tried to embody William’s advice in his own tribute to Williams and his poem. Especially the way MacKinnon demonstrates how to use metaphor to reconcile/the people and the stones! Humans and nature. He does it so simply. He ties the day-to-day folks of William’s poems and his medical practice to the same qualities (who hang on, who pull through) that make the saxifrage so durable and strong. Williams gives us the image of the indomitable Saxifrage. MacKinnon composes and invents a way to take that image to a bunch of expected places. To take Wiliams’s poem further. As a response to the challenge implicit in A Sort of Song!

Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

And how well MacKinnon in his response to Williams takes a huge idea (something seemingly weaker breaking something stronger ) and expresses it through the thingyness of flower, rock and the patient ones, men , woman, children.