Glacier
NSP guest post! Garry MacKenzie writes on his new long poem ...
History
leaves marks. Furrows, striations,
erratic jumbles cluttering the shore.
Accumulated pressure and fusion of ice,
moving its ‘prodigious burden of rock’
across the valley: lithified snow, frozen boulders
scraping away at the land, sub-rounding
of molars and incisors. Then weathering of textures, smoothing
of contradictions in the strata. In the firth, each shore
is a cross-section of time – not river
but an overwhelming, ossifying
commitment to transformation. There are overthrowings,
regatherings: the land, like the mind, is fractal,
near-infinite – it ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order
to re-create.’ Unconformities abound
under superficial permanence.
- extract from ‘Glacier’
I’ve been writing a lot about the Firth of Forth. I live near where the estuary opens into the North Sea, and when I look south across the Firth, it’s easy to imagine that this is a scene from thousands of years ago. In certain lights there aren’t many visible traces of human presence. What’s more difficult to picture is how the Firth looked during the Last Ice Age. Immeasurable tons of ice flowing out to sea, scraping away at the land. All vegetation, all animal and bird life, all traces of early human habitation erased. The islands and hills of today are what remain of larger geological forms eroded to stubs by glaciers.
It makes you feel small, thinking on this timescale, reflecting upon the massive impact of the ice on a landscape which you might assume is unchanging. I wanted to explore this feeling in a poem – a long poem, almost in essay form, which progresses incrementally and implacably. I was interested in how human history might be understood alongside a vaster geological history, not least because – from the point of view of an individual – the drawn-out events of human history can themselves seem like unstoppable forces.
Like an essay, my long poem ‘Glacier’ makes a lot of use of quotation. This was influenced by Marianne Moore’s marvellous poem ‘An Octopus’, about a glacier-topped mountain in North America. I like the instability created by the intrusion of other people’s words upon the poetic voice, and the frisson when terminology from other disciplines is put under pressure in a poem. Glaciers pick up all kinds of debris, from grit to huge boulders, finally depositing them far from their original context. I want the quoted phrases in my poem to be repositioned in a similar way.
The poem’s glacial flow isn’t always logical or straightforward. The quoted sources include now-discredited nineteenth-century glaciology, the Old Testament, Coleridge’s definition of the imagination, and tourism websites. The poem draws heavily upon contemporary science, but also links the Ice Age’s geological legacy to Scotland’s rural and industrial development, and to the conditions which ultimately facilitated Scotland’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Scots are now beginning to look more closely at their country’s role in slavery, and I wanted to reflect upon how that legacy affects Scotland to this day.
There’s a part of me that can never quite shake off – doesn’t want to shake off – the sense of wonder found in Romantic poetry. Even now, when glaciers are melting at an alarming rate and the world’s sea levels are rising, and when history weighs down upon those societies which have been oppressors and those which have been oppressed, I hope there’s a place for awe – at the power of the natural world, at the scale and beauty of the landscape, at the ways in which the human race has laboured for good as well as evil.
My poem is an attempt to capture some of these dynamics as I see them. At times there is optimism and at times, undoubtedly, despair. Poems, like other art forms, are a way to think aesthetically through these complexities.
Hold on. Go back to when the air
was harpoon-sharp, and what beauty there was
was unseen. There is no text for the early morning mirage
cast by a glaciated Scottish sun, no hermeneutic for the way
the frozen Forth would glut on moonlight. If there were interglacial dreams
of evenings warmed by fires of walrus fat, and tales of great white bears and woolly rhinos,
then they are forgotten.
Glacier by Garry MacKenzie is available as an e-book from Wind&Bones. Garry’s next collection, Firth, will be published by The Irish Pages Press in 2026.
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If I can quote two lines, one from the poem, the other from the text:
“the land, like the mind, is fractal” and
“finally depositing them far from their original context” — really beautiful post. Weather is Earth’s language, who’s listening?
Brilliant! Thank you