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The Order of Things: an anthology of Scottish sound, pattern and concrete poems, ed. Ken Cockburn and Alec Finlay (Pocketbooks no. 10, 2001), 208 pp., £7.99, includes CD, ISBN 0748662901.

The subtitle of this book reveals a lot. The quartet of adjectives lets the reader know immediately that this isn’t an homogenous, defined ‘school’ of poetry, but rather a broad swathe of differing stylistic approaches, a gallimaufry of technique, approach and intent. It is also an important, durable anthology, typified by deft selection and eclectic contents. Any critical remarks in the review should be mentally tagged by the reader with the phrase ‘That said, this is a book I must have on my shelf’. What puts the book into the class of superior anthologies is that it raises questions about the very nature of poetry.
     As one would expect, at the core of this anthology are two figures: Edwin Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay, paired through the experimental poetry they wrote in the early sixties. Set within an international context, fostered significantly by Finlay's magazine Poor. Old. Tired. Horse, Morgan and Finlay were working in the vein that has come to be known as ‘concrete poetry’. Outwards from this point, the editors include both (Scottish) historical precursors and present day disciples. Morgan and Finlay, in some ways, represent two diametric positions; the poem as utterance and the poem as inscription. This dichotomy between speech and writing, between temporal and spatial co-ordination, is the recurring liefmotif of the book. The introduction sources the awareness of this double-view to Ezra Pound, rightly so, and his slight schizophrenia about the fact that the medium through which all poetry operates has a dual allegiance, that it can aspire towards the condition of music as much as towards the condition of sculpture. That language appeals to the eye and the ear.
     The selection from Morgan and Finlay is extremely judicious, and rarely reproduces work found in other anthologies. In addition, it highlights the extent more than the fact of experimentation. New forms are forged then abandoned with a Picasso like fervour. Finlay is not just the “one word poem” poet, but someone revelling in the luscious quality of brand names ('Sound Kit Poem') and constructing laconically shimmering acrostics:
 
     T hat
     W hich
     I s
     N ext-to-nothing
     E ndures    (from 'Some Things')

Morgan’s range is equally diverse. It is good to see a emergent poem other than 'Message Clear' (and, incidentally, reproduced accurately: two recent anthologies have shredded that work), and the more intense sound poetry of a work like 'Unscrambling the Waves at Goonhilly', rather than a repeat of 'The Computer’s First Christmas Card'. Nevertheless, the selection re-emphasises the distinctive qualities of each. Morgan, even at his most typographically dense or phonetically delirious, creates a narrative, even a lyric voice. The poems begin, arch, and end. With Finlay, the crux is always the swaddling of contexts around linguistic artefacts, and an encouragement for the eye to drift and swerve over the text rather than doggedly follow. One minor quibble would be not reproducing one of Morgan’s ‘found poems’ cut out from newspaper headlines, witty pieces where the font’s heaviness actually accentuates the lightness of the transposition.
     The other authors are emphatically not the warm-ups to the key figures. Alan Riddell’s typewriter poems are reproduced beautifully, and Iain Bamforth’s 'Unsystematic Anatomy: After Rabelais' is a real joy, especially when paired to an extract from Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Pantagruel. Singling out pieces in an anthology is perhaps unfair, especially in a book where the contributions are so singular; but Gael Turnbull’s 'A Poem Containing' is astonishing. In many ways it is more like a metapoem – if such a chimera can exist – in that it does not ‘make’ the words happened upon in a launderette into poetry, it creates a situation in which the reader is sufficiently defamiliarised that they realise the words were intrinsically poetic anyway. It’s too good not to quote a section.

    the words: load drum, amount detergent, add
       appropriate, desired wash, select cycle, coin
       in slot, proper amount, push slide, add before
       Rinse Light ON, again after Rinse Light OFF,
       not complete until Lid Light OUT (will not open
       until Lid Locked Light is also) –

Similarly, the hints about Peter McCarey’s epic project, The Syllabary, an extract from which is on the CD, make one sorely aware of the otherwise dearth of ambition in a great deal of contemporary poetry.
     If I have one more serious misgiving about the book it is again in the four adjectives: not sound, pattern or concrete; but Scottish. As a Scot, I am impressed and intrigued that Scots made so many unusual examples of these kinds of work. However, it does remove from the book the important context outlined in a sentence in the introduction – “With concrete poetry, Scotland connected to an international avant-garde in a manner barely conceivable today”. Although continental writers are included through dint of a Scottish translator, it would, I believe, have strengthened the book to include more of the major European practitioners. Apollinaire for one is sorely missed. Ditto Kurt Schwitters, whose Ursonate is untranslatable anyway. The presence of Dadaist phonetic poetry, and its rebellious offspring, Letterism, would have created an external point of comparison.
     It also means that certain forms are absent. I’m not sure if there are Scottish versions of any of these, but my two personal favourites in this broad form would be lipograms (works deliberately excluded a particular letter) and holorhymes (lines which are phonetically but not semantically identical.) George Perec famously wrote a lipogrammatic novel on ‘e’; ably translated by Gilbert Adair (Hamlet’s soliloquy becomes “Living or not living, that is what I ask / If 'tis a stamp of honour to submit/To slings and arrows waft’d us by ill tides”), and the Latin poet Fulgentius left fragments of a lipogrammatic history in 23 books, De Aetatibus Mundi et Hominis, where each book omitted a letter of the alphabet, in order. I’m not even sure if the holorhyme is possible in Scots; but Louise de Vilmorin has a fine French example

     Étonnamment monotone et lasse
     Est ton âme en mon automne, hélas!

That’s not even mentioning chronorhymes, palindromes or the Arbitrary Mnemonic (I know of one where the number of letters in each consecutive word must follow Pi).
     One of the most endearing aspects of this anthology is the overwhelming sense that all the writers – whether engaging with shape, music or OuLiPo games – care about words. When poets stop caressing words, the game’s up. The book itself is a success. I hope it will inspire more writers to test themselves in these waters.