The Dark Months of May is a companion volume to Ballad of Jamie Allan: a prequel, really. It starts out as the chronicle of a breakup in a terse, personal plainstyle, which Pickard has been honing since the 1960s (see Hole in the Wall: New & Selected Poems). The personal is always imbricated with the landscape (a la Hardy):
there is something so familiar in what is said
I stop and listen,
a traveller’s monologue of dark moaning trees,
chopped waters,
deserted street corners,
randomly disturbed light,
raised curtains,
doors flung open,
sudden precipitous avenues,
far away dogs brought near
it is insistent
secures my inner ear
we pick up the old conversation
neither of us understands
(“Front”)
The “old conversation” is both between the couple and between us and the physical world. Pickard has spent his whole life in the North Pennine Hills in Northumberland; he is grounded in it. However, as the book progresses, the bottom literally drops out of the landscape, so we see a cross-section of centuries in an archeological dig. And the persona of the author himself undergoes a similar transformation into his alter ego: the boundary blurs between Tom Pickard and Jamie Allan, historical personage, singer and vagabond. The illusion of depthlessness is also figured in the repeated images of “mither” and “rouk,” northern words for the various kinds of mists that pervade the region formerly known as the Borders.
“The Real Tom Pickard,” in which an internet search reveals an alter ego in law enforcement—of all things—is both funny and frightening (“His friends will disown him/all his enemies become mine”) precisely because in the mither or on the borders of identity, you might be transformed into your utter opposite. “Where to Go” and “Whither” throw questions of identity literally to the winds, leading to “Self Abstracting Poem:”
a breeze of rowan lifts
pale curtains of cloud
where hawks stake a claim
to a drifter’s sky
the lick of jigging water
over rock
takes thought with it
and every it it is
it
and us outside it
I outside us
and us it
inside of I
and out
or hung
tail slick as a pack of cards
scuffing gushes
over lush mist
that skulk cloughs
while swift streams
skim speech
from streets of the sea
The “self abstracting” here gets to the heart of lyric and pain; the I, us, and it of self, lover and world; the slow breakup of each into elements. But the aural caress of it is the absolute sign of poetry rushing in to fill the ego’s absence.
“Self Abstracting Poem” is the adagio preparatory to the allegro movements of “Fragments from an Archeological Dig in Gallowgate” in which the dig, layers of which go back to medieval times, is juxtaposed against a bus station with all the coming and goings of all walks of life. And then the book ends on several poems that will become Ballad of Jamie Allan, including “Hawthorn” (quoted in my previous post) which comes to speak for both the heartache in the narrative of Pickard’s breakup and the heartache of Jamie Allan’s life. Who is speaking, where we are, and what time it is, are unanswerable in the final pages.
Some readers believe that poetry must explore identity. Here is a poetry that dissolves identity brusquely, and thus expands it, abandoning sentimentality for anonymity in the mither and historical figure that plays upon airs.
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