Stuart Calton. Sheep Walk Cut
Sheep Walk Cut is a sequence of historical poems about Scotland.
Stuart Calton is a poet and musician more frequently visible under the name T.H.F. Drenching. He has released a large number of albums of freely-improvised music and musique concrète with Fenland Hi-Brow Recordings. He is also the author of The Bench Graft, an angular and impressionistic review of the disgusting history of Parliamentary Democracy.
1-903488-35-4. 2003. £4.00 / $8.00
vision compliance and then we lack
hovels. Sported winning ribbon of
land capped the reel special bright
glaze so we miss amphibious curl of
living pretzel, picking now, lunar industry
of police tourism. Okay but now
this is now too not cloths to keep them
warm and so that when they went to
test relief, enacting, no while we collect
passage revenue and cold trampling bust
alarm twist unbedded reactive stop.
It is hard not to see the events as bordering on genocide, though some historians simply remark that when an "advanced" economic system meets a "primitive" ethnic and social structure, there will be casualties. It is in this aspect that Calton's timely poem might resonate for readers alert to the human costs of contemporary geopolitics. I confess I have only learned about these matters because Calton's poem spurred me to do so: I wanted to understand its fugitive references. I discovered I was not alone; educated friends confessed their ignorance of this part of history was equal to my own.
Calton's approach is not a dramatic monologue or narrative poem (compare, for example, Andrew Motion's dramatisation of forcible eviction in "Inland"). It is elliptical, highly fragmented, a rhythmic succession of drastically clipped references segueing into each other, brutally snipped into 15 pages, each of three clipped quatrains:
"And
smashed its head, sedition
but yes many still cut
grazings in relation shoot
them like birds, joist yes
snip, into which a mile across
country, "to the imminent
danger of her life" pulled
down around the use of
fire on behalf of a
fortune cut artificially populated
stacked coast of cut ratchet
improve, had I not sent a party."
The verses are punctuated by repeated, terse instructions ("cut", "clip", "sew") and intakes of breath ("okay"), as if the arguments surrounding the events, from utopian hope ("can't we just share") to liberal mitigation ("conditions of welfare / happiness unknown to some"), have been sped up into a rapid confusion.
This is a caveat about how history is written, by whom, and why (and, the more one researches the matter, discovering the original sources for Calton's allusions, the more one understands the importance of that caveat). The cutting and clipping is editing (particularly in the context of the swift selections of modern documentary making). The sewing is healing. "Provision, / surgeon, your attendance", Calton writes; and later "please stitch this". The phrase "stitch this" often precedes a head-butt or punch, and these lines manage to convey both the need for healing, and also the terrible violence by which "economic progress" was inflicted. (The ghost of the phrase "stitch up" hangs suggestively too.)
And the violence was terrible indeed: villages burned, some times with old people still inside the houses; pregnant women bludgeoned and miscarrying; a combination of exploitative laws and sadistic policing. The poverty and humiliation visited on a people whose culture is suppressed and mocked - "illiterate, burnt" - has obvious contemporary resonances. Calton's poem, with its rapid mobility and lack of consistent narrative point-of-view, conveys that horror; but in its refusal of a sentimental costume-drama or documentary approach, it also enables the reader to reflect on how the clearances' moral ugliness - the rendering of the colonised "other" as primitive and needful of governance, and the use of economic "reform" as an excuse for inhuman methods of commercial gain - relates to other adventures." Robert Potts, The Guardian 27 Nov 2004. Read the whole review here.