A Wild Goose Chase by Andrew McNeillie
Carcanet Press
A WILD GOOSE CHASE traces its title back to its equestrian origin in a 16th-century manual on horsemanship. In its present day use it serves here as a metaphor for the pursuit of poetry and poems. The poems here, several about poetry itself and ˜The Unlooked For' that poets look for, are preoccupied by their author's deep sense in older age of not belonging anywhere, other than in mind. There he is as free to voyage with the Greek explorer Pytheas, as with his younger self, visiting and revisiting places in the archipelago of Britain and Ireland, giving voice too to the issue of climate change. The book opens with 'In the Wake of Pytheas the Greek', the explorer and trader who was the first (in the 4th century BC) to explore, measure, and describe the island of Britain, in a narrative which translates into English as 'On the Ocean'. A seven-part work, the poem explores episodes in Pytheas's travels, viewing them historically and ahistorically, with irony, and displaying the author's characteristic wit and formal virtuosity. Another work of some length 'Travel Literature', opening in the Bodleian Library, awaiting delivery of a volume of Thomas Pennant's account of Wales, exhibits McNeillie's wit and humour too, as he waits and meditates, in a state of in-betweenness, exploring his mind -- 'God bless the right to roam' -- as he prepares to revisit his memories and compare them with Pennant's, of places he knew growing up in North Wales and remembers reading about in Pennant's pages. A sense of in-betweenness features elsewhere too, in several poems, between then and now, place and map, and so on; and also, for example, in the poem 'Singing School', in the form of the hyphen in the title of Herman Melville's celebrated novel Moby-Dick. There is a preoccupation with the view from old age, and again McNeillie's humour inflects the poems, as everything round about him seems to tell him to 'seize the hour', which he urges himself to do 'while stocks last'. One or two of the poems are given 'concrete' representation, including the title poem, which takes the form of a right-angled triangle (the horse-race, with the perpendicular on the left-hand margin) and approximately an isoscoles triangle (the wild goose skein) mid-page. 'Memory Puzzle' sees memory as a jigsaw puzzle, with pieces missing, and represents their absence with gaps and physical change with kinetic typographical devices. McNeillie's eye and ear are at their best here, whether in poems of some length or shorter. There is humour and there is also social engagement.
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