The Herald - The Herald Magazine
HELIOPOLIS By Hugh McMillan An unwitting mirror of sport
Luath Press, £9.99 Simon & Schuster, £18.99
want a wall/ I want you in bits”. So from the rubble she creates verbal tapestries, starting with “a bubble of babble/ swagger and swallow” (Brent Geese).
Moving to high jinks with Petrarch: “Ill and inky, like a beast/but weaker, and lacking all sense/except to go towards the light –”.
In her seventh collection, she creates her own inimitable cliches: “a circle lands on the meadow of the retina”. Observations are held to be creative creatures.
She introduces them to Abroad. To Trinidad where “my every day is a being in of being /a mixity of worlds”. To Inishbofin where “a looked for line between wet sky and water/seems non existent:”.
She becomes mediator between images and memory at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: “The measure of my universe. /Till now I had not known the meaning of adoration”.
Her creatures are by now word-dressed, lovable honey-eating bears. Preferable to humans, most of the time. Oh, and she likes cats: “aesthetic chest sitter(s)”.
Dumfries and Galloway-born and based Hugh McMillan has over the last two decades become a popular and prolific poet. At times too prolific.
The former history teacher is at his best in the compressed pamphlets he has produced for Mariscat and Roncadora presses. He was twice winner of the prestigious Callum Macdonald Award with the latter.
However, his second substantial collection from Luath has both form and substance.
Over six sections he excavates “the tyranny of history books” and with reforming glee allows poetry to become “that piece of electricity/ between the sting and the poison”. His Liberty Tree has nests of beguiling cuckoos.
THERE are three imperatives for a sportswriter: don’t miss a deadline, write to the precise word count and get the score right. The chief sportswriter, and Simon Barnes filled that role for The Times in a career with the paper that spanned more than 30 years, has a further demand to meet.
He or she (shamefully it is almost always a he) must explain why sport is important, why it matters, how it is an allegory for life itself, how it offers lessons to business, commerce and, no doubt, astrophysics.
This venture into matters spiritual, emotional and even metaphysical should be resisted. But it rarely is and, as a former chief sportswriter, I speak from experience. Imposed from above by a restless editor or simply a product of personal inclination, the search for the soul of sport from the press box at Wimbledon or a bucket seat at Wembley can make sporting atheists of us all.
Sport is not separate from life but part of it. It is merely human beings at play. It is just desire, strength of body and mind, coordination, determination and talent at enhanced levels. Most of us can a kick a ball, run, hit a ball with a racket. The elite just do it much, much better. Sport is real life with added muscle. Real life on steroids, if you will.
But if this is the mundane reality it does not stop the observer investing it with added significance. This, in general, is a good thing. But it can lead to difficulty, even confusion.
For example, the title of Barnes’ book includes the words “why it matters”. The book, though, contains the sentence: “If sport isn’t fun then it isn’t anything very much at all.” So is sport just a bit of harmless nonsense or does it have a wider significance? The answer is surely that it does have meaning and it can be serious, even deadly so.
There is a distinct absence of fun from football derbies, the entire oeuvre of the All Blacks and the Thriller in Manila. Yet they constitute the very essence of sport.
Epic has a simple structure of Barnes writing a chapter on every sporting year from 1983 to 2014. From Eric Bristow and Watford as the second best team in England to Novak Djokovic resurgent and the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, Barnes was there.
He is good, sometimes brilliant, at describing just what he has seen. He can paint a portrait but is less adept at making a case. Like many sportswriters, this one included, he makes definitive judgments.
“If you are a nationalist, you believe your country is better than all the others.” (Nope, that definition is not in the dictionary.)
“Hoddle was unacceptable because he was beautiful.” (Nope, he was never unacceptable but any reservations concerned his limited appetite for hard work rather than his perceived pulchritude.)
“For two days in London, Jessica Ennis was us. Every one of us.” (Not me, mate, and I was both there at the London Olympics and aware of my feminine side.)
Barnes is much, much better and surely more valid when he makes his case with the use of hard fact tinged with personal animus.
Thus he is caustically brilliant on the hypocrisy of rugby when it seeks to take the higher ground over association football, the venality and morally odious cricket tour of a South Africa in diabolical thrall to apartheid, and the horror of Hillsborough and the less well chronicled disaster at Heysel.
Epic thus stands as an almost unwitting mirror of sport. It has its elements of absurdity, its moments of genuine excitement, its periods of self-indulgence that would have a football manager screaming something about “no end product” and occasional, irrefutable brilliance.
Epic may also signify something profound to some. To others, including this observer, it fails in its stated purpose, though that failing may be generously described as of the heroic variety. One can offer polite applause for the search even if the discovery is underwhelming.