By Marion McCready

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I’ll be like King Canute:

post myself, flint-faced, defend this futile beach

against the tide’s increase

from: ‘King Canute’

‘When the Whooper Swans Came’ is Jane Picton Smith’s first collection of poems and was chosen as the 2022 winner of the William Bonar Poetry Prize.

It was published by Red Squirrel Press and designed and edited by Gerry Cambridge who (as many readers will know) is himself a poet, magazine editor, and highly skilled in the art of book design and typography.

Reviews don’t always go into detail about the physical properties of the book itself – but this one is worth describing. The deep aqua colour chosen for the cover is a rich backdrop which beautifully sets off the title, author’s name and central image of repeated Japanese flying swan motif. Pamphlet collections can, at times, have a flimsy quality to them but this pamphlet feels rich and substantial, pleasing to hold, and printed on quality, almost silky-to-the-touch, paper. 

A gentle, lyrical and elegiac voice speaks through these poems, hinting at time passing and the inevitability of losses to come. Themes of memory, history, the memorializing, cataloging and preserving of knowledge and experience echo throughout and work towards creating a quietly accumulative but powerful effect.

The substantial sonic quality of Smith’s work is clear from the first poem in the collection and this is further evidenced poem after poem with the pleasurable coming together of sound and sense driven by the workings of each poem. The pattern of internal rhyme and repeated sounds gives the poems an inevitability which again mirrors and emphasises a key underlying theme of the unstoppable passage of time.

Smith is a Perthshire-based poet and many of these poems are very much set in the Scottish landscape. ‘The Archivist’ is the first poem in the collection and takes the reader along on an imagined future journey on the west coast of Scotland, combined with the memory of other such journeys:

think back to that

archived September of Rannoch Station,

of deer on the moor, receding into rain

from: ‘The Archivist’

Nature is utilised poignantly as an objective correlative in Smith’s poem ‘King Canute’. Smith explores a mother-daughter relationship where the mother expresses her love in the handing down of ‘learning like an heirloom / what you knew of clouds and stars’. The poem gently moves to themes of time passing and loss, addressing the aging mother – ‘Now that you repeat yourself / repeat yourself, forget’. Followed by the daughter’s wish to ‘barter with the waves / to bide their time’ together ‘where we can talk of sea pinks / and forget-me-nots’.

In ‘House on the Hill’, the switching on and off of lights reveals to the outsider something of the secret lives lived within and the temporality of those lives:

All this until we’re gone,

even so, our homes stare on:

douce across the river.

from: ‘House on the Hill’

The title of the collection intrigues with many questions inherent within it: what about the whooper swans? How were they encountered? What happened when they came? The collection’s eponymous poem speaks of waiting for the return of the large number of swans whose departure created:

a collective loss

that none can name

from: ‘When the Whooper Swans Came’

This deftly sums up a preoccupation threaded throughout this collection, that aside from the individual losses we are all susceptible to, there is a collective and shared loss inherent in time passing, day after day, year after year which is too big to name but central to the tragedy of the human condition.

These are tightly crafted poems where, by and large, the words work hard to earn their place. As mentioned, Smith takes clear delight in playing with language and sound. The sonic playfulness of ‘mud-blattered’, ‘daubed in husks’, ‘gauzy watergaw’ roll pleasurably off the tongue. The scattering of Scots words throughout the collection adds to this pleasure.

This more playful aspect of Smith’s work is also evident in some of the imagery and metaphors she deploys such as in ‘Black Bag Blues’ where the bin bag becomes “a bulbous crow”, and in ‘Poppies’ where the poppies are imagined as:

a company of

roosting macaws, flamboyant

as Frida Kahlo, kohl-eyed,

crimson and magnificent –

each seed-head like a well-baked pie.

from: ‘Poppies’

Yet even in these poems, the sombre notes of the inevitability of endings and the losses inherent in time passing are never far away. ‘Poppies’ concludes on the meditation of:

born again, allowed to fade;

each flower weighed

by the rain of future Junes,

until their season’s end.

from: ‘Poppies’

The reader is drawn into imagining the ‘future Junes’ which they may or may not be around to see and the season’s inevitable ending even before it has begun.

Smith’s poems have, at times, a dreamy quality to them. Poems are built on imaginings such as in ‘Before the Tide Turns’ which begins: ‘If we were to beach our boat / on this crescent sandbank’. The poem then takes us into the imagined scenario where the London train is:

a glittering trinket

on the bridge,

throwing back vermillion suns

from every window

from: ‘Before the Tide Turns’

The attention to visual detail and emotional quality invested in the speaker’s surrounding and landscape allows the poem to express much more than what is divulged. This is where Smith’s particular skill is evident: less is more. These are not ‘showy’ poems, rather they grow with quiet confidence, trusting the reader and leaving their imprint like pangs of loss.

It’s not difficult to understand why Smith’s name pops up regularly in short-listings and commendations in prestigious poetry competitions, including being long-listed in the National Poetry Competition. Her poems are meticulously crafted and yet read with a hard-won ease which (as all the best poems do) hides the sweat and labour invested in their creation. It will be interesting to watch how Smith’s writing develops across the space of a full-length collection, which surely must be on the horizon.

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