Voice-Over

by Norman MacCaig

This is Norman MacCaig's first full-length collection since Collected Poems, which won the Gold Medal in 1985. His familiar themes combine to create a world in which people, landscapes and the passage of time are evoked with powerful emotional candour.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

MacCaig was born in Edinburgh and divided his time, for the rest of his life, between his native city and Assynt in the Scottish Highlands. He registered as a conscientious objector during World War II. In 1967 he was appointed Fellow in Creative Writing at Edinburgh. He became a reader in poetry in 1970, at the University of Stirling.

Reviews

[John Burns · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was impressed with this. I liked it more than Voice-over. This volume was released 18 years later than that one so he's a bit older and wiser I suppose. He definitely feels older. There's a definite spectre of death and decrepitude hanging over a lot of this poetry.

Norman Maccaig's poems have this really weird quality. Reading one of them makes you feel like you're rushing across some landscape. You can see all sorts of places and features simultaneously. But the poem you're reading might not even mention any of the things that you're seeing. It's like the words themselves somehow have a strange, innate power to carry the smell and the rain of a distant place. It's like he's spent his career just saying stuff; here's a poem about this and about that but really he didn't want to write poems about stuff. He wanted to write poems that contained stuff, just like a bottle or a jar can contain something. A bottle or a jar tells you nothing about what's inside it, but open it up and there it is. The poem IS something other than what it SAYS. Fixate on what it SAYS and you might miss what it IS.

He still does that stupid crap with the sudden twist. God. I'm gonna write out this whole poem because it's so shit. You ought to see how shit it is.

"He sips from his glass, thinking complacently,
of the events of the day;
a flattering reference to him in the morning papers,
lunch with his cronies, a profitable deal
signed on the dotted line, a donation sent
to his favourite charity.

And he smiles,
thinking of the taxi coming
with his true love in it.

Everything's fine.

And Nemesis slips two bullets
into her gun
in case she misses with the first one."

Oh god. What trash. What was he thinking? I wouldn't mind it but he had one or two poems like this in most of his books. The guy is obsessed with sudden, unexpected doom. Maybe he just needed to find a more nuanced way of squeezing those ideas into his poetry.

If I'm honest he tends to be a bit of a clunky, heavy-handed poet. I think he's a mixed bag. He falls into cliched, doomy visions too easily. And yet I can't help but be mesmerised by his mist-like lightness of touch. His vision and concentration seem pretty impressive in this volume. And yet the poems feel like they are flying all over the place. He seems to have learned late on in his career how to put himself down in the centre of an idea, and whatever comes running to him is true, is part of the poem, deserves to be part of the poem. It seems as if he has picked up the knack of knowing what feels like it belongs rather than simply looking for what ought to belong.

So I don't know if he's a great poet although he seems to have picked up some fascinating element in his later work. I think ultimately he's a charming guy, but it's not an exhuberant charm. He's kind of like the quiet guy that you like to hang out with because he never annoys you or bores you or expects anything of you. There's some kind of sad, static beauty within this man.

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

An autumnal (but no less spritely for it) collection by the great Scottish poet. MacCaig makes virtues of succinctness and observation, his work rich in wit, experience and humanity. But he can also pull a brutally revanchist poem like ‘In a snug room’ out of the bag, its brief handful of lines impacting like a sucker punch.

[Nick Meyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

His last collection and it does have a sense of finality. He wrote with increasing economy and the characteristic dry wit is still there. I do think MacCaig was truly one of the greats and this collection is a just conclusion.

[Gustav Selstam · Rating 3 out of 5]

My stupid brain is not meant for poetry it seems, as this overall did not stir much emotion. Perhaps there is another collection from MacCaig, somewhere out there, that will do the trick.