Independent Bookshop feature No.15. Alexis Thompson of The Woodstock Bookshop: THE GAELIC GARDEN OF THE DEAD by MacGillivray

 

"This will haunt you, if allowed to do so ..."

Alexis Thompson is a writer and bookseller based in Oxford. He has led poetry walks in London on the Modernists for the International Times and New River Press, curated and read in London and Edinburgh and was writer-in-residence with The Parlour Collective. He recently completed an MSt in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford and has had fiction and poetry published in MONK and the New River Press. In 2020 he was the editor of Blackwell's Poetry #1. He is currently finishing a debut novel, titled A Pit of Clay.

As of 2022 he is manager of The Woodstock Bookshop, noted for its yearly poetry festival under its previous owner Rachel Phipps. The Woodstock Poetry Festival is set to return in November 2023 for the first time since 2019.

'I open with a mouth of burning coal', writes poet MacGillivray in this astonishing third collection. Here we have the Gaelic alphabet of trees which, for those of you who don't know, assigns all the letters of the Highland alphabet to specific trees and this gives Book I of The Gaelic Garden of the Dead its unique structure.

But The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is a trilogy; Books II and III deal with a sigil sequence and sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots, consecutively (a discussion of the sonnets was featured on BBC Radio 3 The Verb: listen here) and the whole collection unfolds in your hands like an arboreal haunting; a lament to the loss of an ancient language - particularly relevant now, as Scottish Gaelic is predicted to become extinct by 2031 - and the beleaguered fate of a great queen. Although this sounds far-stretching, in MacGillivray's hands, the interwoven historical with the poetic potency of the book is both striking and what a reader might seek out as tonic from the observational, minimalism of most mainstream contemporary poetry.

'Love’s eyes are colourless:/ a motive for moving through underworlds' asserts MacGillivray, summoning Jean Cocteau, T.S. Eliot and deeply embedded folkloric Scottish roots: there are psalms for lightning; salt, snow and sleep coronachs (the third part of a funeral lament); and references to old Gaelic customs: 'Walking to the heartland of the Gaelic alphabet/ where spirit multitudes sleep rough/ among the bales of slaughtered wheat,' I drank my lover’s blood', a reference to the Gaelic tradition of drinking a little of the blood of a loved one who has been killed in battle. Here we have not only an arboreal meditation on the nature of these trees (ranging from Ailm 'A' for pine, to Quert for 'Q' which is apple - here described under the 'School of the Moon': a traditional name for the teaching of cattle rustling, done at night.)

As with her other collections, the experience is not only of potent poetics but is educative, while never feeling didactic. In reading the book, one feels enhanced as if by secret or lost knowledge into this Gaelic otherworld. Book II, A Crisis of Dream, operates as a visual gateway of pattern-poem sigils between Book I and Book III.

The reader is then confronted by In My End is My Beginning, a line better known from Eliot’s Four Quartets, having been borrowed from Mary Stuart. Book III presents a 'descent' of thirty five sonnets - one for each step Mary descended on her way to execution, which are then 'chewed up' (here a nod to the cut-up technique of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin) for the fifteen minutes Mary's mouth was said to have moved, after her decapitation. The result is deeply moving: the sonnets were composed in situ in many of the sites Mary lived in and at Fotheringhay, on the anniversary morning of her execution. Replete with rich imagery summoned from Mary's own poetry (we learn she was a part of Ronsard's poetic circle 'The Pleiades'), MacGillivray's response and elaboration to Mary’s death and writing evidently comes from a place of deep research and profound sympathy for Mary’s plight, not merely as a historical figure, but as a human being:

I dreamed of a sawdust chandelier
whose crystals were drops of driftwood dredged
from all the world’s shipwrecks: god’s figurehead,
and it swung, as I dreamt, ever closer to my fear,
softly releasing sweet incense into the clear,
black night air, as that great barge carries the dead,
but instead of my death, it passaged my dread
and the water it ploughed comprised of one tear.

This formal descent of sonnets is then wildly torn up: 'my bled out, love flushed, young, wild skeleton!' for the counterpart to The Descent; The Blade and in both sequences, Mary emerges as an impassioned poet which reflects something of her true personality.

This is an ambitious and electric collection - a far cry from the usual - and will haunt you, if allowed to do so.

For fans of Barry McSweeney, William Burroughs and Sorley Maclean.

The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is published by Bloodaxe Books.  

Guest review by Tracey Mathias: THE OVERSTORY by Richard Powers

"A novel for the Anthropocene, for an age of mass extinction brought about by human action: it portrays Nature as we need to understand it now: not as stable and enduring but in a state of catastrophic change."

Tracey Mathias grew up in Cardiff but has lived for more than half her life in London. She has three grown-up daughters, and has been writing for children since they were small. She is writer in residence at the DaCapo Music Foundation, writing song lyrics and performance pieces, and is the author of the fantasy trilogy Assalay. Her latest book is Silence is Also a Lie (originally published as Night of the Party) – a Young Adult love story, mystery and political dystopia set in a near future England.

 

The Overstory deeply impressed and affected me on first reading: I have already reread it and imagine that I’ll return to it more than once in the future. It feels like a necessary book for our age, and one that opens up possibilities for what can be done with fiction. 

There are so many things to admire here. Powers’s prose is beautiful, precise and lyrical. He interweaves the stories of a large cast of characters with skill and poise: introducing them in a series of vivid biographical vignettes and then following them over a broad sweep of time from early years to late adulthood. But more than anything, I am struck by the ways that he imagines and writes the natural world. 

The trees and forests that dominate the novel are described with the kind of clarity and loveliness that comes from close observation. The ‘pinnate leaves’ of an ash tree ‘feather the light and make life feel softer than it is.’ The trunk of a redwood is ‘a triple wide door of darkness into the side of the night.’ In the ‘twilight-green’ air of an ancient forest ‘clicks and chatter disturb the cathedral hush.’ 

These descriptions are not static, either, but full of dynamic life. There’s a running theme about time and the relativity of time here. The novel’s computer genius (whose pioneering games act as analogies for so much else: codes branch; a bestselling game involves the competitive extraction of value from a virtual Earth) remembers a snippet of sci-fi. A race of aliens move so fast that ‘Earth seconds seem to them like years’ and humans ‘nothing but sculptures of immobile meat.’ By analogy, we must see trees in ‘tree time’ to understand them not as static, but as active, moving and purposeful beings, and the energy and vibrancy of Powers’s language does just this: a chestnut ‘spirals’ into the sky; trees in a forest ‘fight for scraps of light’; the roots of Douglas firs ‘run into each other underground.’ And Powers doesn’t only give us poetic description, but poetic science. The book is rich in fascinating botanical detail, especially in those passages written from the perspective of a plant scientist whose major interest is the social life of trees: the ways in which they communicate, co-operate and form communities. 

So narrative doesn’t just belong to humans: trees have their own stories of change and relationship. They’re also deeply entwined with human stories (the novel itself takes the form of a tree, imagining human life as roots, trunk, crown and seeds). Trees are emblems and instruments of human history, love, fate, tragedy, and there’s a hint of mystical connection, in the synchronous flourishing and declining of people and trees. 

But, crucially, this is also a relationship of tragedy and damage. The Overstory is a novel for the Anthropocene, for an age of mass extinction brought about by human action: it portrays Nature as we need to understand it now: not as stable and enduring but in a state of catastrophic change. The novel is elegiac, all its beauty threated with the awareness of what we have lost and stand to lose. Some of the most painful passages in Roots describe the blight that wiped out the great chestnut forests of the US east coast, and the main driver of the plot is the protest against the felling of virgin redwood forest on the West Coast. Powers offers no easy reassurance for the future. There is, one character reflects, a war between trees and humans ‘over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.’ 

Beautiful, painful, urgent: this is an important book.

The Overstory is published by Vintage.

Guest review by Linda Sargent: THE ORCHARDIST by Amanda Coplin

"...draws the reader in as surely as the landscape does, leaving a haunting and uplifting vision of the place and its inhabitants."

Linda Sargent is a writer who works as a publisher’s reader (David Fickling Books since 2002). She has published short stories and articles and her first novel, Paper Wings, appeared in 2010; she is also the author of Words and Wings, a training guide to creative reminiscence work, available as a free download from her website.

“I think we become desensitized to almost everything in life, especially those things that are part of our routine, that we encounter daily. The only way to shake ourselves awake and experience novelty in the everyday is to engage consistently with an art form. Art makes us see the world – right down to our smallest, most intimate experiences – with new eyes.”

So responds the author in the question and answer section at the back of this powerful and evocative first novel, one of my top choices for this year; and I’m sure it will remain there. Set, for the most part, at the turn of the twentieth century in the fertile valleys of the Pacific North-west, it centres on the life of William Talmadge. He is the orchardist of the title, arriving in the valley with his mother and sister in the late 1850’s; we follow his life as he plants and nurtures his fruit orchards of apples and apricots and establishes a home. At first, after the death of their mother, it’s just him and his sister, but one day while out gathering herbs in the forest she disappears and so, at seventeen, he is left alone, his only companionship gleaned from the native American horse-breakers, and specifically the elective mute, Clee (also bereft of family), and Caroline Middey, the healer and midwife from the nearby small town where he goes periodically to sell his fruit.

And so Talmadge (for this is how we know him by now) is, for the most part content tending his trees and expanding his acreage to include the forest and other uncultivated sections of this beautiful landscape, in some respects keeping it for and in memory of his lost sister, nurturing it in the way he is no longer able to nurture her. Until, one day two very pregnant, very young teenage girls, hungry and almost feral, arrive and begin to steal his fruit. From here on Talmadge’s life is changed and disturbed. With the girls comes violence, fear, loss and ultimately a kind of revenge; but what also comes is love and a deepening and most moving warmth between the principal characters. One that draws the reader in as surely as the landscape does, leaving a haunting and uplifting vision of the place and its inhabitants and where the stars are “so thick you could walk right into them...”

It is, overall, a story of nurturing and great humanity – and I loved it.

The Orchardist is published by Orion.