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Carbon Atom by Alexander Hutchinson
(Link-Light, £8.00) 66pp.
Available from Link-Light, 47 Camphill Avenue, Langside, Glasgow G41 3AX

Poetic fashions are every bit as fickle as those in shoes and music, with writers and styles undergoing similar processes of exposure and amnesia as skirt-lengths, trouser cuts, guitars and synthesizers. Alexander Hutchinson’s Carbon Atom echoes the format of late sixties Cape Goliard and Fulcrum Press publications in both appearance and content, happy to run against the contemporary grain with a notion of the avant-garde that ignores the Cambridge school and instead allows the shadows of Robert Creeley, the Black Mountain and the 60s poetry of Edwin Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay to fall over its pages. ‘Jimp’ gives a flavour of the approach, a short jeu d’esprit about a girl:

     Jimp she was:
     neat as a needle;
     sprightly, lively,
     slender as grass

   The lines are as frisky as the subject, and other poems display a similar keen eye for the blend of word, sound and observation, as when the resumption of a council debate is visualised as a “beetle stranded/ on its back, which with a/ sudden twist, a jerk, flips/ front and forwards on its/ face again” or swifts are glimpsed as “hinges/ creaking in the air”. Hutchinson uses folk idioms and dialect very effectively in ‘Aince Wuid, An Aye Waur’ and ‘The Poet’s Advice To Himself’ (“Hink, swink, swipe and swish:/ Swizzeld, swyvit, swanny;/ When the great aul Wife steps/ Doon tae pish – ye’d better/ Shift it Sauney!”). In ‘Mao And The Death Of The Birds’, Hutchinson constructs his own equivalent of one of Aesop’s Fables, as Mao first thinks the birds take “more than their fair share of grain” and so must die, then, having achieved his aim, prompts the poet to reflect that “what removed our/ feathered friends [was] merely/ another bland imperative” and conclude with the moral: “When arbitrary despots rule, we/ all are thralled to blind obedience”. The mechanism creaks at times, and the craft here isn’t Hutchinson’s best, but the folk idiom is clearly a source of strength throughout. Best of all, perhaps, is the long closing sequence ‘Epistle From Pevkos’ dedicated to the unjustly neglected English experimenter Gael Turnbull, using Turnbull’s own distinctive prose-like but resonant stanza forms to frame thoughts on life in Greece, sometimes celebratory (as in “God is there anything creamier than yoghurt curds/ with Monólithos mountain honey stirred through?”), sometimes more unsettling: “Yesterday I thought I could detect the coastal shape/ of Turkey; earlier in the week perhaps the outline/ of a warship or patrol boat – grey, low slung along/ the line of sea and haze. Politics and menace are always/ there – even when we can hardly make them out”.