Review by Rob Spence
We don’t celebrate the linguistic diversity of these isles anything like enough. Just think of the rich heritage of Welsh, Gaelic, Irish, Manx, Scots, Cornish, Norn — not to mention the myriad regional dialects that still resist the homogenising influence of modern mass communication. This variety of language use embodies much of the cultural history of the nation, and it’s important that we preserve that vital element of what used to be called “our island story.”
It’s gratifying, therefore, to welcome another volume in the Northus Classics series from Britain’s northernmost publisher, Michael Walmer. William Tait was a significant poet, writing in English and Shetlandic, whose work has for too long been unavailable. This new volume is a reprint of Tait’s only full-length book, A Day Between Weathers, published in 1980, and constituting his collected poems over a forty-year period.
Tait was a Shetlander by birth, from the island of Yell, and his life and work never strayed too far from his roots. After graduating from Edinburgh University, he had a teaching career in England and mainland Scotland as well as back on home turf in Lerwick. His poetry began to appear in magazines and journals in the 1940s, and is characterised by both its emotional intensity and its fierce political commitment. As a young man, Tait was for some time a member of the Communist party, and retained his left-wing outlook throughout his life.
The volume is introduced by Christie Williamson, himself a noted Shetland poet, and one with a personal connection to Tait, who was a neighbour in Williamson’s childhood days. Like his subject, Williamson varies his language between standard English and his native Shetlandic. For this reader, the Shetlandic, a dialectal mix of Scots and Norn, is reasonably easy to grasp, and Tait provides a useful glossary for unusual words, like toetak (“a notorious person”) or brigdee (“basking shark”). Otherwise, with your inner ear tuned to the sounds of the words, the English equivalents soon present themselves.
Not that “translations” are required: the poetry, vigorous and resonant, grabs and holds the attention, whichever register is chosen. The variety here is striking: as Tait himself says in his introductory note, written for the 1980 edition, “a first collection of poems written over a period of forty years is likely to be an untidy parcel.” To tidy that parcel, the book is arranged in three sections. The first two derive titles from Chaucer’s aphorism at the beginning of The Parlement of Foules: “the lyf so short, the crafte so long to lerne.” The first “lyf so short” section is a miscellany; the second “craft so long to lerne” section comprises poems dedicated, according to Tait, to “the illusion that one woman differs from another.” He is, as he acknowledges, quoting the American essayist H.L. Mencken there. The full quotation, from Mencken’s 1916 collection of epigrams, A Little Book in C Major is “Love is the illusion that one woman differs from another.” And certainly, the second section of Tait’s book is about the travails of love. These are generally short, lyrical pieces, often dealing with the agonies of love lost. The third section is dedicated to poems written during the Second World War. Tait, who as a young man had been struck ill with pleurisy, eventually leading to pulmonary tuberculosis, was declared unfit for service, and spent the war in the Home Guard. The poems from this period are powerful statements against the horrors of warfare.
Within these broad categories, there is such a range of topics and poetic technique that every page brings some surprise. Reading this book on a rainy day in April, I was struck by this passage:
Held in the slaty hollow of the sky,
Based in the tarnished pewter of the sea,
The snow-pied hills deny
The anachronism, Spring.
That’s a good example of how Tait can refresh a hackneyed subject in vivid terms.
Surprisingly, several of the poems collected here are Shetlandic translations of French originals by Villon, Ronsard and Baudelaire. Here is the opening to Tait’s version of Villon’s “Ballade à la grosse Margot” in which a pimp speaks of Margot, the whore.
If my weel-willied dame I serve an love,
Man I be held a toetak or a nyaff?
In her is every bliss your hert can muv,
An, feth, nor sword nor shield ta fend ye aff:
Fur, whin da men come, I rin furt an skaff
A pint or twa, no toed at laek a foel.
I bring dem maet ta aet an watter coel,
An if dey pey weel, tell dem: “Sae be dat!
Come ye again whinniest ye’re arg ta roel
Here I did hoorhoose whaar we had wis at.”
Tait’s version owes nothing to the best-known English rendition, surprisingly written by the Victorian Algernon Swinburne:
What though the beauty I love and serve be cheap,
Ought you to take me for a beast or fool?
All things a man could wish are in her keep;
For her I turn swashbuckler in love’s school.
When folk drop in, I take my pot and stool
And fall to drinking with no more ado.
I fetch them bread, fruit, cheese, and water, too;
I say all’s right so long as I’m well paid;
‘Look in again when your flesh troubles you,
Inside this brothel where we drive our trade.’
It’s a long way from medieval French, but certainly Tait seems to capture the earthiness of Villon’s original more accurately than Swinburne’s rather more conventional take.
Some of Tait’s English love poems are in more traditional vein, and cover familiar ground, often with a plaintive earnestness. “To Jackie” seems to be a wistful remembrance of a lover now gone:
Your name, slim, epicene, belies you. Not
But what you’re slender. Legs like shafts that drive
From heel to hip-bone, turned immaculately —
Jointed, articulated, clean of line —
Yet blur, confuse, delectably all but blend,
Then change their mind, even more delectably.
It is perhaps in the poems written during the war years that Tait most obviously shows his ambition. In particular, the long poem “Scorched Earth” is a very impressive feat of imagination, conceived in the darkest days of the war. In it, Tait imagines a Scotland invaded by Germany, where the retreating home forces lay waste to the land. It’s an apocalyptic narrative, framed as a radio broadcast on a dodgy wireless. The narrator enumerates the places destroyed as the soldiers work to hamper the enemy’s advance, leaving a fiery wasteland behind:
….Names alone can never tell
Their story to a world which does not know
And maybe does not care: but names alone
Are all I bring. The stand at Hunter’s Bog,
Day-long defence on Calton Hill that changed
Disgrace to glory, or the price they paid;
For every dirty wynd and lane in Leith;
How history came again with heavy hand
Upon the Royal Mile whose every inch
Was drenched in peerless and plebean blood;
The street we praised or slandered, always loved,
Where every crater was a fort and grave;
The shambles in the Gardens; the Home Guard
Who held the Mound all night…
Tait’s range is impressive. He is equally at home in English and his native dialect, producing arresting and affecting poems in both modes. It’s appropriate that a new edition of this collection is now available, and it is to be hoped it brings this work to a new audience. Tait’s poetry is the result of his lifelong engagement with the principle he sets out in one of his Shetlandic poems:
.Write wis up; write wis doon; write wis aff; bit fur Goad’s sake write
As if you meant it. Mean it. An goed luck!
Rob Spence’s home on the web is at robspence.org.uk
William J. Tait, A Day Between Weathers: Collected Poems 1938-1978 (Michael Walmer, 2026. 9781763565692, 269pp., paperback.
BUY at Waterstones via our affiliate link.
