Cabaret McGonagall

by W.N. Herbert

Come to the Cabaret on tour somewhat erratically in the North. Sample its impassioned ballads, phantasmata, and despairing satires. The cast includes a suicidal Pict from Galloway, Morayshire's unsavoury Third Corbie, and the demented Edinburgh surgeon, Scrapie Powrie. Appearing now at the House of Fear, King Shit-Click's Palace and Bede's World.

In this new collection from W.N. Herbert, the verse veers from the Whitmanic to Dunbar-like flytings, and the language lurches from Scots to English through all half-way houses. The result is a big bad anxious trip through the Information Age with one of the most various of contemporary poets.

W.N. Herbert is a highly versatile poet who writes both in Scots and English. Sean O'Brien has called him 'outstanding...a poet whom nothing - including what he terms "the Anchises of the Scots Style Sheet" - will intimidate'. For Douglas Dunn, his was 'the best writing in Scots - thoughtful, studied, clever -I've seen in years'. Jamie McKendrick admired his 'vibrant' poetry, his 'ear for the sensuous music of Scots' and his 'ability to effect sudden shifts of scale that bring the human and the cosmic face to face'.

Paperback

First published November 1, 1996

About the author

W.N. Herbert FRSL (b. 1961) is a Scottish poet. He writes in both English and Scots. He and Richard Price founded the poetry magazine Gairfish. He currently teaches at Newcastle University.

Herbert was educated at Grove Academy and then studied Brasenose College, Oxford, becoming a Doctor of Philosophy in 1992 after completing a thesis on the work of Hugh MacDiarmid.

In 1994, he was Writer-in-Residence for Morayshire and one of 20 poets chosen by a panel of judges as the New Generation in a promotion organised by the Poetry Society. He was one of the writers involved in the Informationist poetry movement that emerged in Scotland in the 1990s.

In September 2013, Herbert was appointed as Dundee's first makar.

Reviews

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

This includes one of my favorite poems, "Answermachine." When I used to teach, my students used to think this meant I was pretty goofy--how deep can a poem purporting to be an outgoing message be, right?--but I still think it's a lovely presentation of presentation itself, of language's intimacy and solitude, and, of course, there's a funny bit in it, too. I love Herbert's work overall, but this one, because it's the first I read, perhaps, or because it laughs at language even while it handles it so deftly, or perhaps because it also has the poem "A Difficult Horse," stays close to my heart. Plus, if you aren't from Scotland or fluent with native speakers of the dialect, you get to discover many of the poems only when you read them aloud. Or at least that's how I came to them.

[Philip Nikolayev · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first book by one my favorite current poets, a Scot. That's how I got into Herbert's verse, and I have been following it most closly since. It is vital, dazzling, wild, versatile, and I love it and want more and more. The real deal.