Radical Renfrew: Poetry from the French Revolution to World War I

by Tom Leonard (Editor), Marion Bernstein (Contributor)

Radical Renfrew challenges the view of nineteenth-century West of Scotland literature which sees it as a desert in which a few ‘minor figures’ it asserts that people have been deprived of a whole literature of what they once held to be valid poetry. The introduction closely argues why and how this has come about.Nearly four hundred pages of poetry are brought back into print, all from the extensive archives of Paisley Central Library where Tom Leonard worked as writer-in-residence during the book’s compilation.Besides known Renfrew poets such as John Davidson and James Thomson of Port Glasgow, over 60 other writers are featured, including the forgotten radical feminist Marion Bernstein, and the pungent Chartist satirist Edward Polin. For the reader’s help, a guide to some of the main themes supplements the contents list.The aim of the book, Leonard stated, was to be pan of that process by which anyone can use the public library to reclaim and reconstruct their own past.TOM LEONARD was born in Glasgow in 1944 and died in 2018. This book is published by his surviving family, thirty years after it was first published.

Genres: Poetry

382 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Tom Leonard (born 1944) was a Scottish poet, writer and critic. He is best known for his poems written in the Glaswegian dialect of Scots, particularly his Six Glasgow Poems and The Six O'Clock News. His work frequently dealt with the relationship between language, class and culture.

Leonard also wrote plays, sound poetry, political polemic and a biography of the 19th-century Scottish poet James ‘B.V.’ Thomson, Places of the Mind.

Reviews

[Ade Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last week I enjoyed the great privilege and even greater pleasure of meeting Tom Leonard at our writer's group's annual residential at the Welsh National Writing Centre, Ty Newydd. Tom spoke about the book and kindly gifted us a copy which I immediately purloined.

As writer in residence at Paisley Library, Tom discovered hundreds of largely out of print books and pamphlets containing the poetry of writers who lived in Renfrew during the period indicated in the title. he set about reading them all, and here he presents an anthology of them coupled to brief biographical notes of each poet. The book also includes reference numbers for those wishing to go to the publications, either in Paisley or at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. Also included is a thematic guide underthe headings of: Religion, Alcohol, Emigration, Employment, Unemployment, Trade Unions and Co-operatives, Anti-Ruling Class, Parliamentary Representation, Republican, Feminist, Soldiering and Police, Literature and Reputation, Town and City, Nature and the Country, Astronomy and Microscopy, Poetry Using Shape.

Tom's introduction is a gem, and should be read by anybody with an interest in literature, wherever they live. It is a passionate and masterly analysis of the elitist class strand that filters literature into the discarded and the acceptable 'canon', and which embodies codes which from high determine what does and does not constitute a proper poem. He examines how 'dictions' of the masses are sneered at, seen as degraded or worse, and how ruling ideology attempts to maintain a hegemony of culture that reflects itself as 'natural'. His most passionate claim is the equality of a human, of a human being the human that they are, and he elucidates what this may mean. The introduction is radical, of course: it begins with the line: Any society is a society in conflict, and any anthology of a society's poetry that does not reflect this is a lie.

The poems included here are indeed wonderful. Included are extracts from James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night, and Tom spends some time in his introduction demonstrating its thematic relevance to our present lives. Indeed, the project as a whole is relevant to our lives. What a marvellous thing it would be to see it repeated in libraries up and down the 'kingdom'. These days especially when there are desperate attempts by some elitist university literature departments to cling on to their status by resurrecting that old lie of canonical literature's being a moral force to colonise and improve the groaning underbelly of society (that's about half of us, I reckon), it has never neen more important for us to resist such nonsense and assert our voices by right of being who we are.

[Gavin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A nice thing about Britain, or the Old World at large, is that there’s a piece of art for most places. Thus even my tiny village has a passable ballad, ‘where the river meets the sea’, while my mate’s Wirral has a full seven hundred years of contempt to draw on (as well as my top album of 1998).

Paisley has the first bit of Espedair Street – but also hundreds of Industrial Era pamphlets and gazetteers that Tom Leonard dug through, finding a hotbed of utopian socialism, zero-wave feminism and farmer’s rage. (I don’t know if it’ll sink in with locals though; they’re more likely to get excited about Gerard Butler going to Paisley Grammar.) "Radical" isn't a compliment, as Leonard (and Kelman, and Nairn, and Macleod) think it is, but it often marks at least interesting things.

See here.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

An anthology of poems by writers born, or at one time living in Renfrewshire, collected by poet Tom Leonard whilst he was working at Paisley Library. The book is worth reading just for the excellent introduction by Leonard and the thumbnail sketches of all the writers at the start of each section. I found trhat the most impressive poems were by some of the women, eg Marion Bernstein, whose stuff from the 1870s on women's rights, domestic abuse and other topics is razor sharp. If you aren't familiar with Tom Leonard's own work, go seek it out. http://www.tomleonard.co.uk/

[Ally · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book includes a great introductory essay about how we relate to art and literature and what this says about us politically. Leonard also digs through Renfrewshire library archives and unearths some really good poets from the 18th century who were previously overlooked due to their being radical, non-conformist or feminist.