On the World That Calls Back

Niall Campbell on Jack Gilbert and the world’s response

For a while my father tried to be a freelance electrician on the island. The house phone would ring, and a creaking voice would explain that their television was dead or their cooker had blown. It seemed rare for men to live to an advanced age, and so it was more likely that the caller was a poor, elderly woman whose life was falling apart around her. My father was a good electrician but too empathetic for the billing side of being freelance. It would play out like something from Dickens when he returned home from a two-hour job – my mother already complaining at the door, because he had accepted no money, but there, tucked under his arm, was the fruitcake that he had taken as payment again. All of which is a roundabout way of explaining that for a long time we grew up quite poor. For a period, to make ends meet, my mother would take us down to the shore on weekends to gather winkles from the rocks to sell at the fishing market. Why am I thinking about this? It is because I read a Jack Gilbert interview where he complains about the situation on his return to Greece.

Gilbert:

Unfortunately we found the Greece we knew no longer there. Our Greece was wonderfully bucolic. Very quiet, peaceful, slow, friendly – farmers ploughing, a couple of men in small boats, almost no electronics…

Interviewer:

What’s there instead?

Gilbert:

Mechanisms mostly. Europe is now rich, busy, and modern.

He blames electronics. Mechanisms. He reflects that ‘The places I’ve loved no longer exist’. I wonder if this is not true for everyone. We are always returning to find the world not what it was. The Scottish islands have seen quite large-scale change – million-pound yachts moor in the harbour beside the rusted fishing boats – but I also want to consider an inner change as having a bearing on this feeling.

There is a poem in my most recent collection about being a crab-sorter at the weekly fisherman’s market. I would be positioned at a corner of a box being filled with live crabs and asked to take them out one by one, separating the large from the small. It was repetitive work – made hard by needing to stand for so long and because the sharp top-shells of the crab would cut the hands. It was methodical, meditative work – the sky above the pier darkened and I sometimes would sort until close to midnight. Gathering winkles was different. There we were taken down to the shoreline. Not to the beach but to the rockline, which was slippery and uneven. The autumn tide had slunk out exposing a clear strip of white sand and dark rocks covered in bladderwrack, the most common seaweed that surrounds the coast.

Winkles are small molluscs, around the size of a 5 pence coin, and you need to collect them by the hundreds for them to be worth even a small amount. My brother David and I, as the two eldest, took a handle each of the faded, red plastic bucket that served as a receptacle for coal, peat, potatoes – and that day, winkles. My mother would lead the way, holding the hand of a younger brother. When we stopped, it was always her hand that lifted the dark weeds from the face of the rock. I remember she always parted it neatly, up and over. It was graceful and methodical. How an islander might lift the veil of his bride. The action set sandhoppers skittering in the disturbed sand. Sometimes it would uncover green crabs with soft, young shells. But the rock exposed, the purpose was to pick the ten or so winkles from where they hidden beneath the weeds, wetly dark as black pearls.

On that day, approaching one especially large outpost stone, our bucket already half-full, my mother pulled back the seaweed and revealed the large surface of a rock covered completely, every inch, with winkles. Even decades later, they laugh about my reaction – I jumped around the beach proclaiming that we were rich. Of course, we were not.

All children are conscious of their situation. I knew our need not as something necessarily shameful but as a cloud over things. But still, I’d maintain that my reaction was less to do with the potential for being rich and having our problems alleviated, but more to do with that other thing that I have been thinking about, the idea of the world as a place that responds – a place that understands the want or the need of the person, and reacts. Back then, the world was alive – and in more than just the way of animals and plants, lapwings and bog cotton. It was a place that might listen. Now, returning to Uist, it is hard to feel that old belief. Once, it seemed the hard wind blew the body in a certain direction because it was serving as a guide. Now, mostly, the gale is just the gale. That old faith has all but elapsed.

Which brings me to John Ruskin’s definition of a poet as a person to whom things speak. I understand it is a less subscribed-to position. My contemporaries seem admirable as types who follow that idea of Shelley’s, where the poet is the setters of standards and rules, ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. I saw Alice Oswald recently and thought about the strength of such a stance. Praise difference, perhaps – I feel my own life lean more towards Ruskin’s definition than Shelley’s. For me – what the poem can be, now and then, rarely and seldomly, seems linked to this act of hearing the world speak back. It hears the whisper between things. I read Jack Gilbert’s interview and then went to his last collection, Refusing Heaven – and, remembering the beach, the bucket, and the stripped rock, I read

We stand at the prow again of a small ship

anchored late at night in the tiny port

looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront

is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat

comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth

all the years of sorrow that are to come.

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Niall Campbell will be teaching on the ‘Writing With’ course - starting 20th September. Tickets still available. Get all the details at northseapoets.com 🌊

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