POEM OF THE WEEK

Stewart Sanderson is an explorer of language and landscape – and in his poems, the one can very easily slide into the other. He hikes up an eroding hillside, and calls it “this written and unwritten ground … my footprints footnotes to its loss”.

The landscape of his recent first collection The Sleep Road is that of his native Scotland; the language is a sprightly range of tones and styles, sometimes rich with literary references and words in Scots dialect (such as “swither” – to hesitate between options), and at other times written with a strippedback simplicity that recalls a fellow Scot, the minimalist Thomas A Clark.

“I like formal constraints and strange words, with a lot of my poems starting as responses to both,” Sanderson has said. One poem in the book, for instance, is a kind of song composed entirely from names in an antique spotter’s guide to Scottish lichens. Who could be immune to the charms of “Tender membranaceous Lichen”, or resist a smirk at “Black nobb’d fuscous Lichen”?

The constraint in this week’s poem is subtler, but in its own way just as taxing: it’s an exercise in monorhyme, each line inescapably returning to the same sound. In the wrong hands, it would sound unbearably clunky, but Sanderson handles it so deftly that an unsuspecting reader might not even notice what’s going on, at least until they’re halfway through the poem. The title, “Seeking”, could refer to the opening line’s bird of prey in flight, the final image of a radio listener seeking a signal, or perhaps even the poet himself, desperately seeking something else that rhymes with “O”.

Speaking of “O”, in the second half of “Seeking” Sanderson nods to Arthur Rimbaud’s famous sonnet “Vowels”, in which the French poet declared that “A” is black, “E” white, “I” red, “O” blue, and “U” green. Language as landscape; painting-by-letters. Tristram Fane Saunders