Names Was Made To Be Spoke:
Commemoration in the Poems of Glyn Wright and George Mackay Brown 

            When Glyn Wright’s Could Have Been Funny came out from small-press Spike in 1995, critics seemed agreed on one thing: apart from being good, he was new, contemporary, up-to-the-minute, urban and modern in his concerns. It therefore came as somewhat of a surprise, when I actually read the book, to discover that though he was a kind of poet I like very much, it was not quite the kind I’d been led to expect.

            For a start, dazzled by the unexpectedly urban and industrial settings – sheet-metal foundry, factory, docks – most of the reviews I’d read seemed to ignore another common factor about these settings: they were on their way out. The factories and foundries were in memory, or close to closure, the docks past their heyday, the seamen and factory workers retired or redundant. The proud owner of a new satellite dish in ‘Knowing Plenty’ had bought it with his redundancy cheque. Many of the poems were set in Liverpool and their frenetic energy often felt like that of someone dashing around the city with a camera, desperately trying to photograph and put on record a whole way of life which was almost gone, and soon would be.

            Linked to this urgency was an obsession with naming; the words “name” and “call”, with variants, dominate the collection. “They called us the Mary Ellens of the boats” begins one poem (‘The Mary Ellens’, about ships’ cleaners); another, in the voice of a woman who briefly worked on the docks until male hostility drove her out, contains its speaker’s name in the title (‘Bessie McGrath on the Docks’). The name is not obviously important in the poem, yet the whole point of writing the poem is to preserve in memory the fact that there was such a person. In ‘Seeing the World’ a retired sailor “keeps” the places he has seen but will never see again by naming them:

                        I collar people in the pub. I name the names:
                        Freemantle, Cape Town, Trincomalee
                        and then I’m almost there.

Later he uses the same obsessive naming to keep hold of mates long dead:

                        Vaughan, McTaggart, Ryan, Morrissey.

            The poem which for me was the key to the collection started in the same way as “The Mary Ellens”:

                        They call me Baldy. Old Git.

The voice in this poem, “Snarling Tool”, is that of an ageing sheet metal worker and the “they” are younger men in the trade who inevitably have a different, more transient attitude to it:

                       Half what we know is useless. So they say.
                        One lad reckons he’ll be doing something else
                        by the time he’s thirty-five. We built up
                        tool kits to last a lifetime.

These tool kits, or rather the naming of them, constitute the greatest point of contention between the older man and the lads, who see no need to learn the traditional names for them:

                        They call them: This one; or: That one there.
                        First thing I did was learn the names.
                        Feller said to me: “Names was made to be spoke
                        and if they’re not they die, so learn them.”
                        So I did: bick iron, half moon stake,
                        sugar loaf mandel, swage block, horse.

The speaker’s loving enumeration of the names, and his old mentor’s rationale for learning them, are revealing. There is nothing utilitarian about it; nobody suggests you can’t get by with “this one” and “that one there”. It matters for the sake of the names themselves, because if they are not used they will die. And that matters because names do not come from nowhere:

                        Old blacksmiths, tinkers, left us those names

and little or nothing else. The names they gave their tools have outlived their own names and are their only immortality – poignantly, in this poem, people’s names are not remembered. The man who gave this advice is a “feller”; he himself, to the young lads, is “Baldy” or “Old Git”; they do not use his real name and we don’t know it. This one, or that one there. 

I think it was at this point that I knew whom Wright reminded me of, and it wasn’t anyone I’d been expecting. That list of names recalled another to mind:

                        At Burnmouth the door hangs from a broken hinge
                        And the fire is out.
                        The windows of Shore empty sockets
                        And the hearth coldness.
                        At Bunnertoon the small drains are choked.
                        Thrushes nest in the chimney.

And so on through the names of eleven deserted crofts, a sonorous roll-call of the absent. This was the untitled poem in George Mackay Brown’s An Orkney Tapestry, in which he calls the names of the empty houses of Rackwick, each one bestowed by someone who lived there and now the only witness to the fact that they did.

            The settings of Mackay Brown’s poems were rural, like his own, which is why superficially Wright looks to have little in common with him. But the preoccupations are the same: an urge to record, to keep in memory, above all to name. On one of Wright’s rare excursions into more distant history, ‘Mungo Park’s Journey of Discovery’, the parallel is more obvious. Again it is full of the names of men, and of the places where they died:

                        Sergeant McGee, Privates Hill and Purvey
                        were written out between Toniba and Bambikoo.

His expedition wrecked by disease and stranded in hostile territory, Park cobbles together a “patchwork boat”; even this has a name, given it by Park and faithfully recorded in the poem – “launched it as HMS Joliba”. At the end, when Park and three soldiers drown in rapids, it is oddly upsetting that while three are named, the fourth is not. It makes him far more dead, somehow.

            Wright’s poetry strikes me as being firmly in a long tradition of celebration and commemoration, of a determination to mark and keep what was, while one still can, not because it was necessarily wonderful in itself but because it happened, it was there. I think this is possibly more of a Celtic than an English obsession (Liverpool is, of course, the capital of Ireland and arguably of North Wales as well), and it’s notable that it was Liz Lochhead, a Scot, who when reviewing Wright pinpointed him as “elegiac”. In fact English critics sometimes seem to equate “celebration” with “undiscriminating praise” and rubbish it accordingly. I have never been so annoyed by any piece of criticism as I was by a book I don’t choose to advertise, whose author accused Mackay Brown of idealising Orkney’s past as some sort of “Arcadia”. In fact he consistently depicted its hard, needy and sometimes brutal side along with its beauty and sense of community. You don’t need to consider a place idyllic to want to preserve the memory of it – any more than Wright needs to think Mungo Park a flawless hero. Park, as the poem makes clear, was on someone else’s turf, among people who had some right to consider him a threat, and he was prepared to shoot his way out; he seems to have accounted for a fair few. Perfect he was not, but his courage and loving nature were real; his ludicrous, doomed adventure happened, and is therefore a candidate for celebration, like Rackwick, snarling tools and ships’ cleaners. To judge by the poem named for them, the Mary Ellens who cleaned Liverpool’s boats had a rotten job and Wright does not romanticise their lives, a ceaseless struggle, both at work and at home, to assert cleanliness against “coal dust and carbon black”. He merely records it – merely? No, there’s nothing mere about taking the time to record small triumphs like a clean step or a shared joke, lives which were for the most part unnoticed and which might otherwise be lost. “How these curiosities would be quite forgot”, muses John Aubrey, “did not such idle fellows as I am put them down”.

            Of course there is an element of praise in celebration, or at least a judgement that something or someone merits preserving. It was never more clearly expressed than in an incident in the Icelandic Eirik’s Saga, where a ship is sinking and there are too few boats. A man left behind on the ship calls to one in the boats:

            “Will you leave me here, Bjarni Grimolfsson? When I left Iceland with you, you swore we would share one fate.”

            “That cannot be, now”, said Bjarni, “but take my place in the boat and I will return to the ship.” 

Bjarni goes down with the ship; his friend in the boat comes safe to port and tells the tale. The point of the story is that though, ten centuries on, we know the name of Bjarni Grimolfsson, we do not know that of his friend; he may have preserved his life for that time but nobody, including him, thought his name worth preserving in the saga. “Cattle die, kinsmen die, I shall die myself” says the Norse Edda, “the only thing that does not die is the name a man leaves behind”. At least, not if those whose task is to record such things take care of them. Mackay Brown, whose heritage was both Norse and Scots, was as obsessive a namer as Wright. Real names echo through his work – the crofts of Rackwick, William and Mareon Clark, pioneer settlers (‘William and Mareon Clark’, from Voyages, 1983). But where names were lost in time he would invent them, and use them over and over in his work until they became emblematic for their kind, for tinkers, or husbandmen, or monks, anything rather than leave someone entirely unnamed, unrecorded, as if they had never mattered. Poem after poem – ‘Halcro’, ‘Hamnavoe Market’, the whole Foresterhill sequence – is populated with invented names that put a shape on shadows.

            It is true too that Mackay Brown enjoyed praising better than denigrating, though he did both when necessary, and this willingness to praise made him seem, especially to critics in love with irony and invective, not sharp or modern enough, less than cutting-edge. It will be interesting to see how they cope with Wright, who as far as I can see has exactly the same preference. In his two books to date, Could Have Been Funny and Shindig (Bloodaxe 1997), there is a vast preponderance of praise over blame, of celebration over attack, even, God help us, of feeling over irony. Shindig is dominated by sound, by song and instrumentation, as Could Have Been Funny is by names, and if the key line of the first collection was “names was made to be spoke”, then that of the second, spoken by a shantyman being teased by young sailors for his old songs, is “A man has a voice to do more than just mock” (‘Adrift’).

            The connection is the voice. If people (poets?) do not speak and use words, the words will fade. If they do not use their “voices”, spoken or written, to commemorate people, places, trades, events, ways of life, then those too will die out of memory. And if they do not celebrate what needs to be celebrated, then Bjarni Grimolfsson and his friend in the boat will be as nameless as each other, as “Baldy”, as the fourth soldier in the African rapids.

            It is no surprise that the superstitious feel a witch can work magic by speaking someone’s name. A writer certainly can, and sometimes even more by using his power not to speak it. When I think of the poems that have made the most impact on me, names reverberate through them. Place-names in Sorley MacLean’s elegiac ‘The Wood of Hallaig’. The long muster of the dead in Aneirin’s ‘Y Gododdin’. Paul Muldoon’s ‘Meeting the British’, where on the one hand General Jeffrey Amherst’s name is branded on his act of genocide, yet the name of the speaker whose people were wiped out by it is lost altogether. Which, one wonders, is the worse fate? To be commemorated for an act of cowardice and cruelty, or to be nameless altogether? A variant, I suppose, on the ancient Greek conundrum; would you rather be the Olympic athlete or the poet who celebrates him? One could argue that without the athlete, the poet would find another theme, whereas without the poet, the athlete’s name will die. But that doesn’t really say anything about their respective value, only about the awesome power and responsibility of naming, of being able to name, of having a voice that can speak and keep names.