By Eleanor Livingstone

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Nuala Watt, whose poems have appeared here and there over the years, with some of them being special commissions, is a writer to watch on the Scottish poetry scene.

A pamphlet from Calder Wood Press in 2015 was well received, and this debut full collection, The Department of Work and Pensions Assesses a Jade Fish (Blue Diode Press), has been worth waiting for. I should mention that this review is based on a pre-publication PDF of the book. I haven’t yet seen the book in print so can’t comment on the cover, paper or typesetting.

Watt is a writer who seems keen to try everything at least once: sonnets, a sestina, a ghazal, a villanelle – some formal, some playful with the form – a clever concrete poem, prose poems, free verse, as well as perfect miniatures each tucked into a handful of lines.

The book’s title led me to expect poetry on social and political issues, as does the short biography at the end. Watt describes herself as a disability activist and Quaker and explains that she views poetry as a form of activism. But the title also features a jade fish, injecting colour and wit to intrigue the reader.

While the poems here vary in style and form, many of them also cohere around themes. I began reading this book not long after watching ‘Mr. Bates vs the Post Office’. The writer of that television drama, when asked why she thought it had made such an impact, as the scandal it dramatised had previously appeared in articles and documentaries, echoed the familiar advice to writers to “show, not tell” in her reply; while the factual accounts generated sympathy for those involved, her drama made us feel as they felt.

I found Nuala Watt’s poems to be similarly effective, offering as they do an insider’s view of difficulties that many experience. One of the early poems in the book, ‘Girl Without A Pearl Earring’, anticipates what must be an all too familiar response:

Please never say, to me,

woman with disabilities.

They are not jewels.

I cannot put them down.

The poem’s reference to Vermeer’s painting also reminds us not to read poems always as self-portraits, but does so in words that declare this poet’s own authority on the subject.  

The diversity of form and style balances this serious topic and contributes to the book’s liveliness. Watt confronts frustrations around disability without solemnity or despair and conveys a sense of life being something that warrants close study but also pragmatism. ‘Diagnoses’, lists medical conditions, presenting them as housemates whose habits are familiar:

Dyspraxia upsets the Scrabble board.

Cerebral Palsy hunts for missing blanks

The topic of new parenthood, sometimes complicated by vision or mobility issues, inspires a long sequence of poems, perhaps the most remarkable in the collection. Watt describes with optimism and humour, as well as sharp realism, experiences that are personal to her but that resonate with me. I’d expect them to resonate with many parents, as will the excitement that bubbles through. The prose poem, ‘Pregnant and Squint’, leads off with tongue-in-cheek irony:

I had a holiday from awkwardness. Can you have sex? was solved

still, the joy is clear:

We were disconcertingly well. Nothing Abnormal Detected. . .

Watt conveys tenderness without sentimentality, not an easy trick to pull off when the subject is babies and small children. In ‘Infant Feeding Cup with Painted Turtle’, fractured lines and spacing reflect the confusion around early breastfeeding and its paraphernalia – nipple shields, breast pumps, ‘percentages of lost weight’ – and the crying. I found this so evocative, unlike the turtle painted on the cup who is addressed as a different type of mother, one spared such human stresses and interventions, who “hazards / your own infants to the sand”.

The jaunty rhymes in ‘Machiavelli’s Baby’, and the cuteness of the infant’s imagined responses, don’t disguise the exhaustion and frustration of a new parent trying to follow guidance. The baby can even become, if only fleetingly, “the supervillain in the sling” who “coerces you to walk and sing”.

From a turtle to Machiavelli to a swift: Watt’s biography also explains that for her poetry is a method of thinking. Another poem finds her, half-asleep, musing on the differences between human and bird brains, and noting some advantages in the latter. Still battling new-parent exhaustion, she covets the swift’s “asymmetric slow wave sleep”. Clever spacing and line breaks echo those middle-of-the-night fretful thoughts and actions when:  

Colic insists I hold and sing to her

though only my breasts are awake.

From ‘Why Am I Not Like a Swift’

In the sestina in this sequence, craft is present once you look for it, but it never gets in the way of images that paint a sharp truth:

The days seem hazardous as scattered glass.

It seems as though my sole work is to nurse . . .

From ‘Mother’.

Watt writes with humour that has sharpness but less patience in poems about the the indignities inflicted by an unsympathetic bureaucracy. The repeated lines and phrases in ‘Disabled Person’s Travel Card’ fairly gallop along: “Council, council, let me on the bus [. . . ] but the council tore it up”. You can understand the need to vent and some of the poems about motherhood express similar frustrations. ‘My Baby Belongs to the Health Board’ has as much energy and even more edge. Elsewhere the approach is more subtle. In “Hoard”, the Fire and Rescue authority have given the parents a deadline:  

We must make a

fit space for a child from this, the flat’s subconscious. Daleks

live here like malevolent bins. Pregnant boxes, ancient

chairs. By Tuesday I would pay to have a fire eviscerate

the hoard. Please help us, fire.

Take everything away, except our child.

The way in which sight functions is another theme of the book, or perhaps a sub-theme. The poetics of partial sight was the subject of Nuala Watt’s PhD thesis and it’s an issue to which she keeps returning throughout this collection.

One sonnet, ‘On Her Partial Blindness’, is a response to Milton’s Sonnet 19, ‘When I Consider How My Light is Spent’, often known as ‘On His Blindness’. Watt addresses Milton, she adopts the pattern and even the same end rhymes found in his poem, but offers a more positive approach to a situation that might daunt others:

I’d rather exploration than lament:

sight as lost paradise. So my poems need

to make a sense I’m neither banned nor blessed

but breathing here . . .

In ‘The Eye Chart’, the text decreases in font size and legibility, line by line by line. The chart in this concrete poem, laid out like the familiar one on the optician’s wall, is not so much an aid to better vision as a threat to the positivity of the previous poem, an obstacle course to be navigated. Halfway down the speaker is still able to believe her eyes “can hold a solar system, catch all lights”, but by the end she is:

         huddled at the bottom of the page . . .

where letters are illegible as stars.

Another of the poems on vision, ‘The View’, takes a more scientific, or at least detached approach when it explains that:

Vision is still a draft.

The brain corrects the eye’s syntax.

The last line concludes with hands walking over “a deep blue ground”. Several poems later, I wonder if this and the earlier “blue earth” connect somehow to the ‘fireblue’ in the poem of that name, in which Watt dares to use an invented word.

I can just sit here

outlineless with a flecked flame.

There may be jade in the book’s title, and in the title poem, but it’s the colour blue that persists, a not-so-shy theme hiding in plain sight. Surely it must be a coincidence that Watt’s publishers are Blue Diode Press, but nevertheless it seems fitting. Blue is here, there and everywhere, from “blue faces” in ‘Functional’ to the “dark blue swallow” (‘Swallow’), “blue swirls” and even “a blue hyperlink to God” (‘West Scotland Area Quaker Meeting’). Then there’s the ‘Blue Glass Fish’ poem, and in the sestina ‘Mother’, blue repeats itself, twisting and turning through lines and verses, in and out of meanings and connections. More blues, this time “glorious dusk blues” offer consolation in a poem about covid (Winter 2020-21); and in ‘Dialogue on the Dark’, a reflection on vision ends by advocating for that season. Watt can condense images into a couple of words and then mix and match them to gripping effect:

all-purpose hex; assassin; foxes’ time.

I wish I could appoint a lawyer for winter.

Let there be an amnesty. Sit. Watch deep blues approach.

This is a strong debut collection from a poet whose use of craft is never obvious, except when she wants it to be. She addresses serious topics with wit and humour, patience and optimism, never trivialising them but using lightness to direct light where it is needed and appreciating when it’s time for shade.

However, she also allows herself, and us as readers, to be diverted by glimpses of jade and blue fish, by turtles and swallows, or shadows that “gallivant” across a wall (Child and Shadow). It’s perhaps no wonder in such a confident first collection that Nuala Watt chooses to end her response to Milton’s sonnet by confronting his famous last line. It reads like an affirmation, a commitment to her own poetry, when she declares:

I feel and write. I do not stand and wait.

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