Red Ice

by Colin Mackay

Colin Makay works as a nightwatchman in Edinburgh at weekends, devoting all the rest of his time to writing. He spent some years in London, living the typical young writers hand-to-mouth existence. Red Ice id Colin Makay's first collection of poetry. It confirms him as an important new voice in poetry, someone who is not afraid to attack entrenched ideas, as in the title poem, Red Ice. He writes from the center of the European tradition of pessimism, combining critical intelligence and sympathy for human suffering. His writing also has a local flavor, evoking with great clarity images of Edinburgh and Scotland, past and present

56 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bitter, accusatory poems on Stalinism from a self-described "European pessimist" (i.e. in the line of Diogenes, Hobbes, Arnold, Spengler, Schopenhauer). A sensitive man betrayed by the terrible course of communism, he goes in for nihilism:

We were hungry for belief
hope fed us human flesh.

(This isn't generally what it feels like to change your mind on something important; it rings of deconversion rather than grudging error-correction.)

Mackay had a terrible time of it, he suffered without even getting thrilling hubris or an heroic end. Many canonical artists had unusually hard lives and/or mood disorders. But it's not necessarily that sad people write better. Instead here's what I think happens: audiences do not default to being receptive to others: we need to be woken up to a book, whether by personal recommendation, or shared biographical detail, or some other gimmick. A tragic biography is the most reliable primer. (Witness the death bump.)

(It's not nice to attack the hegemony of the sad in art. 1) They are still good, when they're good; 2) they are often Witnesses, speakers-against-power, and anyone can be crushed by having to do that; 3) leave them some bloody consolation!)

I would love Mackay's poems to be incredible; I was extremely moved by Mackay's (self-published) suicide diary. But they're just ok. Of moons, angels, deserts, atomisation, Hendrix. Red Ice was written well before Bosnia (the crowning horror of his life), but it's already overflowing with ruined empathy and snarly emptiness and survivor's guilt.

Are there great paintings in only black and grey? Well, sort of. Calvary features four times in twenty poems.

the mountains are mere hills
the calvarys are daily and inconspicuous
and we are retreating into closed worlds

Mackay was trying genocide verse, forty years after Adorno and twenty-five after Geoffrey Hill. (Does it matter, being late to the worst thing ever? No, but do it right, do it new.) The brute fact of the C20th drives him to nostalgia and lairy isolation

[I said] I will be me for the hell of it
[he said] you working-class tory
you aren't worth a shit

So the poems are chaste, romanticism with the innocent wonder ripped out; unleavened except for his spurious racial memory of everything being ok, once. (Wordsworth at Katyn. I do not think highly of Wordsworth.) The long title poem has automatic force, being as it is about the gulags and the shame of apologism (Lenin and Stalin (and Trotsky and...)). But it's also uncompressed, clumsy with rage ("stop these follies of the human race!"). It condemns by MacDiarmid and Sartre by name, which is rare and ok. On hypocrisy, silence on Soviet abuses in favour of focusing on lesser Western crimes:

[They told me]
"Find something in your own hemisphere!"
to salve my Commie conscience with, to express solidarity with.
(If only there was someone I could express solidarity with...)

There is one poem that really gets somewhere: "Phantoms", a fast, vocal, twisted/triumphant repudiation of war and hippies alike.

One night I rose to count myself and found
that I was loose change from the age of plenty,
little piles of sweaty much-handled hope,
promissary thinknotes tissue-thin
devalued below use,
and I cried then, A dream! a dream!
I am tired of too much reality!
...And I woke,
and stood before my window,
and looked to the West and saw
a giant city that was lit with despair
that stank futility,
and looked to the East and saw
a barbed-wire labour camp reeking
of death, dictators...

O television pop world
of toothpaste and handsome people!
I see I am now a Mirage in your eyes,
an Eagle, a Falcon, a Mig 23, 25, 27,
a Tupolev, a Tornado, a Sukhoi, bigger
better, deadlier armed than before,
swingwinged and shining and lethal,
when in my own sad fantasy fact I am sitting
slumped in sweaty shirt and pants after a night
spent strafing the emotions,
staring at a sunlit breakfast table
with blank and stupid face.
And I turned from the place of aerials
where the screech-hawks of power sit perched
and wandered off, away, far away,
down a long corridor crying for
God to return to the breast of his image
that is lonely, O so lonely, and wandering lost
across the plain, hammered on by the hooves
of daemon horses where
God's jackass
bray.

And though they could hold the thought that lights the beauty of the stars
and leap forward through death
and through the doors of oblivion
there between eternity and the night and the sea
where Blake and Shakespeare and all the prophets
are unread and need not be read -
still they grin, grin.

No friends, I am not mad,
for I have seen them on the clear horizon,
ghosts of television wars lifelong,
of Algeria, of Indochina, of Ulster
and Ogaden, Sinai and Afghanistan.
I have seen migrations of silver planes
with wing stars red and white
crapping napalm, crapping bombs
high explosive, nuclear, thermo-nuclear, biological.
And I with my tin six-guns
ready to be a hero
firing off caps against such missiles
that some bored but competent officer in the Urals
will launch with a button
blasting philosophy and idealism
and eternal consciousness to hell
in four easy minutes...

Lady be mine, while there is still time,
in a country made for two.
We can find its door if we know no more
than any man and woman do.
Before falls the fire from the blue blue sky
on some lunatic's launching day,
lady be mine, O lady be mine,
let's fuck our lives away.

And "Holy, Wholly My Own" is admirable Golden Age pap. I want to call him 'Nightwatchman of the ex-socialist Scotch soul', but I don't know if that's a sentimental response to the poor bastard and not the poor bastard's work at all.

All that said: I'm still thinking about this book (or this man) five years later. Plus one.