…a poem is like a bomb, a bomb like a poem…
Scottish poet Michael Pedersen is well-known on the performance circuit. He is a co-founder of the Neu! Reekie! literary night in Edinburgh and is also a lyricist and playwright.
His last chapbook was called The Basic Algebra of Buttering Bread, which makes the title of his new collection sound a tad pedestrian. But do not fear, Play with me contains enough intriguingly titled poetry to make up, with works such as Quitting Cheese and When I Fell in the Bog two of my favourites. (I can’t quite appreciate Dead Skin and Stray Fingernails).
There is the occasional simple black and white sketch by Carrie May, but the 71 page volume mainly contains autobiographical poems of youthful experience in Scotland. There are also poems of travels, and life in Cambodia where one piece tells of witnessing mob justice. Pedersen finds some evocative phrases, including ‘…next time I wield a conversational pickaxe with mistimed velocity…’, and the recognisable ‘crumbs smooshed into a carpet.’
Edinburgh Festival evokes the wet experience of being in the Scottish capital in August, but also ponders on the aftermath that most people don’t see. What does happen to all those flyers, the rubbish, the marquees? Does life in Edinburgh actually go on between Augusts?
Pedersen turns to Scottish vernacular to discuss heredity. Other poems also contain a few unusual words. Some are clearly Scots and their meaning is obvious. Others needed the urban dictionary to sort out – do you know what a gomper is?
This is a vocabulary-stretching collection where the poems continue in the footnotes. Honest and expressive, he sees a friend in hospital ‘bleeping like a dying smoke detector’. The sombre lines will stay with you longest, in particular ‘We’re each just little pieces of puzzle trying to find a fit, before we lose our shape.’
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