By Helena Nelson

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Child Ballad is rich, packed with detail, incredibly varied in form and style, with masses of references. You can’t skim-read it. Well, you can, but if you do, you get a false impression of who and what this poet is. For me, he’s a slow read, each poem its own new self. This makar doesn’t explain where he’s going or where he’s been. Why should he? Too lyrical to be modernist, he’s too post-modern to resort to endnotes.

I found it best to allow the various elements (the Gaelic and French, the geological terms, the place names, the flora and funga) to illuminate my way without trying to understand everything (‘illuminate’ as in a medieval manuscript).

These pages are an open invitation into a person’s brain, into its unpredictable, but always literary, loops and tangles. Through epigraphs, translations, allusions, quotations and dedications, David Wheatley stakes out his territory and identifies his (mostly male) influences, but he’s not like any of them, not really. He is, as they say, something else.

He may not explain himself, but the back jacket tries. It forgoes endorsement in favour of a long description of contents, their style and multifariousness. The last sentence alone seems to me essential: “Child Ballad sings of midlife, of resettlement and marriage as well as of parenthood.”

That sounds straightforward enough, almost as though this is an ordinary collection. However, it’s not. That statement will prove useful eventually but it won’t help at the start. At his online launch, the author himself said:

The opening poem [‘The Companions of Colmcille’] is set in the sixth or seventh . . . or is it the seventeenth century? It can’t seem to make its mind up if it’s talking about some Irish saint’s journey in Scotland or the ransacking of Aberdeen by royalist forces in 1644.

Well, yes: Colmcille usually refers to the Irish abbot and saint, Columba, who probably crossed the waters from Ireland to Scotland around 563 AD. The poem, however, is dated 1644 (at the time of the Scottish civil war between Royalists and Covenanters). But you’re inside the Wheatley brain, whose owner describes himself on X as a “neoclassical Aberdeenshire Jacobite”. This initial ‘historical’ piece is surely more about the poet himself than any Irish saint. Poem two, ‘Bucksburn’, opens even more mysteriously with a verbless non-sequitur: “Or: the hired box down a lane.” The third poem (‘Stay’), on the other hand, is engaging, affecting and natural: “Baby of mine descending / from the nurse’s arms / into your mother’s like / a heron approaching its nest / and unpacking its legs”.

But that is what this poet does. At times frustratingly enigmatic (best of luck with ‘In Search of the Tenderer Thorns’), he’s often cheerily easy to relate to (‘Long Slide’). Thanks to the variety, moreover, weariness isn’t an issue – except possibly in ‘A Curious Herbal’. This long piece (29 pages) concludes an already substantial volume and although it has considerable character, a pamphlet of its own might have been a better idea.

Nevertheless, whatever Wheatley does, he’s deliberate and skilful. Sometimes a poem looks spacily contemporary, as in the jumpy, staccato fragments of ‘Wolf Girl, Clais Mhadaidh’. At other times, he goes retro. ‘Alteration’ flourishes iambic pentameter and full rhymes, while the tetrameter quatrains of ‘Glow’ might even appeal to non-poets at, say, a christening. He can write formal, or free, constrained or expansive. One formal sonnet is in French! In truth, whatever your taste, you can find something to like here. Perhaps even to love. You just have to rummage around a bit and take the poet on his own terms.

The first piece to win my heart was ‘Mr Green’. From square one, this prose poem opens a literal and metaphorical door: “I’m standing in the doorway trying to zip up my son’s coat before we go out [. . .]”. When life gives you metaphors (doors, coats, rain, children), make a poem. The episode ends gorgeously with a pen portrait of “Mr Green, our laughing boy already spilling out of his big billowing coat”.

Often the work seems to grope its way towards understanding, rather than grasp it. But Wheatley isn’t afraid of uncertainty, and that’s something else I like. ‘Our Lady of the Snows’ quotes from a traditional Scottish ballad, though its own form comprises unrhymed couplets, lines similar in length but unmetrical. It plunges straight into a narrative – or so it would appear:

When the redcoats took Corgarff they found
the fire still lit, a cat on the hearth-rug,

and piled-up snow in an open window looking
over the pass.

This seems to refer to the Redcoat refit of Corgarff Castle in 1748, though the cat and the snow must be imaginary. The reader might assume that story will continue, but no. Next, we read about Lady Campbell’s death by burning in about 1571 (as recorded in ‘Edom O’ Gordon’, Child #178). Wheatley omits the full grisly details (traditional ballads thrive on gore) and the time of the attack (Martinmas).

But Corgarff is in Wheatley’s home territory, Aberdeenshire. Perhaps there was snow the day he visited – because I think he did visit. And I think the Martinmas detail (in the original ballad, but not in his poem) made him think about: “St Martin, who shared his cloak // in a snowstorm”. How else did St Martin get iinto this poem? When the first-person narrator remarks that the driver of a passing car “was in fact the Queen”, I believe it really was our late Queen (Corgarff isn’t a million miles from Balmoral).

By some elusive route, all of this connects with ‘Our Lady of the Snows’, usually the Virgin Mary but present here only in the title – and perhaps in “the absent / wafer of the snow that was not falling”. Inside David Wheatley’s head things are . . . complicated. But they’re also pleasing, like a puzzle just about to be solved. The core message is clearly summed up: “When / we speak of lost histories it is real / bodies we mean”.

The following poem (the second ‘Child Ballad’ of the book) is both nearer to, and further from, ballad tradition. It starts in the past tense, then switches to historic present like the old songs. Language and tone are slightly archaic (“he’s courted you once and he’s courted you twice”), yet the lines are all four-stressed (not the four/three pattern of common metre). There are two quatrains, then two tercets – in fact, it’s a tetrameter sonnet sans punctuation but with rhyme scheme, lovely, haunting and odd. It has nothing to do with children (unlike the first ‘Child Ballad’). It might be about a ghost. Whatever it’s about, the poem dictates the form and style it needs. The rest is up to the reader.

For me, the radical (and successful) variety here indicates someone who allows each individual piece to grow organically into its ‘right’ form. David Wheatley has the skills, instinct and scope to do this. He could turn to his own purposes almost anything our verse tradition has established in the last few hundred years. A rare bird, indeed.

Child Ballad by David Wheatley is available now from Carcanet Press.

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