The Floorshow at the Mad Yak Cafe, a short book of 40-plus poems, is a three-part collection that relaxes the reader as it travels with them.
As many of the poems were written on holiday in Assynt, the writing represents something of a tour of that area. Sutherland, a place synonymous with Norman MacCaig in my mind, showcases some of Britain’s most unspoiled wilderness.
The mountain Suilven features prominently in Will’s first section, and the writing proceeds at the leisurely pace of a mountain-walking expedition. The prose is unhurried and line lengths are winding and calm.
Most of the material is blank verse with a conversational diction and wistful tone, such as Now You See It, which hums with meditation:
today i find paw-trackson beach gravel, spraint on a boulder,look round for an otter and see…nothing… or everything but otter
The Long Walk In is wet with its language, a fisher’s-eye view of river life and the walk towards the start of a great assent. Tree stumps show the way “like bones of ancient monsters” but promise growth and regeneration rather than decline and decay.
Leaving the far north for the entanglements of human life, Crocodiles of Dundee refreshes with its humour and puns. Even in the midst of a main line journey through east Scotland, Will re-figures his watched subjects as saurian. The result is an animal travelogue, down to a curious throwback to 1980s journalism.
The stand-out for me is Thumper, a human study about an injured rabbit. Animal poems have most people reaching for the Ted Hughes songbook, though Will’s moral treatment stands beside the likes of Hawk in the Rain’s material. The related Caucasus pastoral reflects a shepherd’s vigil and is refreshingly non-didactic:
We are our flock’s teeth an terror;their face against the howling world.
Similar in tone, Field Notes is a delightfully atomistic view of nature at day’s end.
The last section deals with a tour of Tibet, culminating in a visit to the Mad Yak Cafe. Each entry is suffixed by a Buddhist refrain and is best to be read collectively.
A short history of Xi’an reminds of Kafka’s A Message From The Emperor, and Credo has hints of Church Going by Philip Larkin. However, unlike the arch-grouse, Will is more careful to accord the rites and philosophy of eastern culture an observer’s respect.
Last Rites is a sombre reflection of burial practices, if not a little matter of fact: “That’s why he says/we don’t eat fish maybe they’re/our ancestors?”
In what could be considered the negative image of the Vedic-like poems, entries such as The Jewel in the Gym “youthful lies”, Don’t (I’m pissed off crying/Over other people’s spilt milk), and Mr Self-Destruct chafe with spite and anger in this book. I didn’t find much insight to their writing but they do seem like an afterthought to the Suilven and travel poems.
The meditative analyses of eastern culture are (for me) asides to the main show: The Sutherland-inspired nature poems could have filled the whole pamphlet and I would have been in love with its entirety. That being said, the reader may be left with the feeling that Will’s best on these subjects is still to come.
The Floorshow at the Mad Yak Cafe is available to buy now.
Image used under Creative Commons licence courtesy of geograph.co.uk user Keith Wilson.