Dane Holt reviews GUB by Scott McKendry (Corsair, 2024)
Belphégor, Lord of the Gap, Hell’s Ambassador to France
Bradypus variegates, the brown-throated three-toed sloth,
is surely the laziest bastard in the South American jungle.
Once a week, she climbs down from the high canopy
into the O horizon, where she takes a shite on the detritus.
This is dangerous, as there are jaguars there, and yourselves.
Is the brown-throated three-toed sloth afraid? Is she fuck.
You would cootchie-woo cootchie-wootchie-coo any sloth.
So would I. But she neither wants nor needs our affection;
nor our sympathy when the harpy eagle swoops in for the kill.
Taking it in their stride, all sloths know evil, and this isn’t it.
Would you cootchie-woo cootchie-wootchie-coo a layabout?
a human one? Would you fuck. You’d say, ‘Pull yourself up
by your bootstraps, away out and work or start a revolution.’
And you wouldn’t cootchie-wootchie-coo a beggar neither.
Harpy eagles don’t beg for brown-throated three-toed sloths –
like all good entrepreneurs amongst the Homines sapientes
they go out and take the bastarding bull by the bastarding horns.
You would feed a ploughman’s lunch to a harpy eagle. Admit it.
The Knorr cryodesiccated noodle ship would be touring along
the river creating a market amongst the Amazonian tribespeople
and you’d be cootchie-woo cootchie-wootchie-cooing a sloth;
or feeding bits of Red Leicester and pickle to a hungry harpy eagle
from a bumbag slung over a branch. And I, Belphégor, would be
egging you on. ‘Go on, love,’ I’d say, ‘that’s fucking ingenious.’
For a long time Louis MacNeice’s ‘Snow’, with its incorrigible plurality and celebration of the “drunkenness of things being various”, was an object lesson for a new generation of Irish poets – Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, et al – whose careers began in direct sight of the Troubles. ‘Snow’, it has been argued, gave licence to operate within disputed territory, one that resisted the political glibness of both sides being “as bad as the other”. Scott McKendry’s debut has the measure of this history. The territories of GUB are indicated early on, in the note at the threshold to the collection. ‘Gub’ is both noun – the mouth as well as “a person who insults others with no good reasons” – and verb – “to hit a person, especially in the mouth” and “(in sport) to defeat overwhelmingly”. These definitions are borne out and then some. But McKendry doesn’t end there; we’re also given the word’s etymological wanderings, from Gaulish, through Scots, English and Norman, to Old Irish. It’s a potted history of dispute, invasion, conquest and allegiance.
The poems have as vast a stomping ground as I can recall in contemporary poetry; you’re as likely to end up in the Amazonian rainforest as you are North Belfast
The poems have as vast a stomping ground as I can recall in contemporary poetry; you’re as likely to end up in the Amazonian rainforest as you are North Belfast. The opening poem is spoken by the demon Belphégor, who, for those of who don’t know, is ‘Lord of the Gap’ as well as ‘Hell’s Ambassador to France’. What could this demon, granted a rare opportunity to speak, have to tell us? “Bradypus variegates“, the brown-throated three-toed sloth, / is surely the laziest bastard in the South American jungle.” Two questions spring to mind: which poet(s) does this sound like? and where is this going? Absolutely none, and absolutely anywhere, are the answers. Belphégor’s treatise on the brown-throated three-toed sloth takes in the creature’s habits and habitats, their relationship with harpy eagles, and the botched obsessions of late capitalism as represented by the “Knorr cryodesiccated noodle ship” serving the inhabitants of the Amazon River and the feeding of a ploughman’s lunch to a hungry harpy eagle, presumably by a tourist, presumably while being filmed for Instagram: (“‘Go on, love,’ I’d say, ‘that’s fucking ingenious.'”) At the back of my mind is James Dickey’s poem, ‘The Heaven of Animals’, reworked for the new century; the animal’s heaven being what we, the earthly consumer, have improved upon.
Elsewhere, in ‘Five Zillion Geese’, greylag geese thrive on a Loyalist estate in Belfast and are watched over by a gallery of murals:
[…] those for Cromwell, Cúchulainn, Luther
and Iron Maiden’s Eddie the Head
dressed up as the Trooper, moonlighting for the UFF.
Almost inevitably, someone stuffs one for Christmas dinner leading to an announcement graffitied on the courthouse wall, its simplicity and directness verging on tender, shaded by menace:
LET IT BE KNOWN
AS WITH TOURISTS
GOOSES ARE TO BE LEFT TO THEIR OWN DEVICES
There are other things at play here – coercion masquerading as protection, territorial anxiety – but everything in McKendry’s work is handled with dedicated verve and swerve and an unimpeachable ethical core. McKendry is serious rather than sombre, alive always to meaning’s multiplicity: “Something’s rotten down on Denmark Street.” (‘All I Want’s My Goose Back’). Nowhere is this more evident than in poems that detail violence or the threat of violence. The poems don’t glorify or revel in it, nor do they shy away from its actual shape:
I mind C.C. shouting, ‘Ernie, get the friggin’ keys, they have a gun!’
as I bent down to pause Sea of Love, and as quick as they came,
they were gone.
(‘Fiesta’)
I knew a hog once. That saddleback bastard bit my mongrel.
She bow-wowed, I vowed an ear for an ear. But that year,
the Road in such a shambles, we’d no time for small-beer jazz.
(‘Butcher Boy’)
It feels indecent to quote a few lines of a McKendry poem because every aspect – sound, history, voice, form, context – is in constant orbit, taking turns to flash into view. It’s a heady, full-on experience.
Great events are decided in McKendry’s work – the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, for example. Although not present, the consequences and complications of the ‘Peace Process’ are inescapable. The question becomes, therefore, what does ‘post-Troubles’ mean, not only in literature, but for the inhabitants of this seemingly continuous aftermath. (McKendry writes out of a place still waiting on the dividends of the Good Friday Agreement. A 2018 Northern Ireland Assembly Research Paper found that Belfast North was in the top three most deprived areas, with 31% of the working age population in receipt of at least one employment-related benefit.) Perhaps what ‘post-Troubles’ poetry does is apply pressure retrospectively. Mark Rothko once said of Turner, “he learnt a lot from me” – Turner died fifty-two years before Rothko was born, but the point stands: our understanding of Turner is altered by our understanding of Rothko. Influence, especially literary influence, is never one-way traffic, streaming forwards only. What McKendry’s work does, other than being read in its own time and in its own right, is evaluate and appraise the work of the past.
As such, we understand a so-called ‘Troubles’ collection like Ciaran Carson’s Belfast Confetti (1989) to a greater extent once we’ve read GUB. A particular instance is Carson’s lyric essay ‘Farset’, which tries to get at the meaning of ‘Belfast’ – from the Irish Béal Feirste – landing somewhere at the confluence of two rivers, the Farset and the Lagan. In ‘Headcheese’, a poem of homesickness which is also sick of home, McKendry views the Lagan anew:
[…] I wanna go home
and drink buttermilk, but the thought of Mary,
Mother of God, sucking a cedar skelf from Joseph’s index
and the big snowy owl stained with rat blood
make me wonder why I ever go home to the Lagan’s lagan
There follows a list of details and incidents that are alive with love and enthusiasm, but it’s that double usage of ‘Lagan’ that draws the attention. Lagan, in a legal context, is debris washed up from the sea. Thus we have an image of lagan washed up from the Lagan, or else a river formed entirely of its own debris, its own wreckage. Furthermore, who owns it? Who claims its territory? In this way, the book is cast in a different light; Irish poetry, especially that written in the North, is cast in a different light. Not to mention the fact that, according to Carson, another speculative translation of ‘Belfast’ is ‘mouth of the poem’. The poem’s gub. Who can speak it?
Two questions spring to mind: which poet(s) does this sound like? and where is this going? Absolutely none, and absolutely anywhere, are the answers
A lesser poet might be satisfied with simply making north Belfast their subject and leave it at that. It’s terra incognita as far as literary landscapes go. “And I lived in a very strange place; I lived up in Ballysillan” as Eileen Myles says, quoted in an epigraph to one poem. That being said, the neglect shows signs of being rectified, with Dawn Watson’s brilliant We Play Here (Granta, 2023), which weaves the interconnected narratives of four young working-class girls in north Belfast, a full decade before the Peace Process began. McKendry anticipates our ignorance but doesn’t trade on it by merely cataloguing the place’s strangeness, although there’s a decent helping of that.
The Twins McLaird have a pair of nunchucks each they fling
and flick – show their knack for tricks – to passers-by.
(‘Five Little Terrorist Boys’)
So I’m about to light up a tutti-frutti cigarillo wrap stuffed
with Alaskan Thunderfuck
when Our Gordie walks in with a Mormon elder
(‘Zawba’ah, Lord of Friday, the Planet Venus, the Colour Green and Iron’)
How Carl Marks got through seven years of primary school
without a raised eyebrow, never mind sniggering, at roll call
God only knows.
(‘Greasepaint’)
His attentive gifts and appropriateness, to co-opt a Seamus Heaney phrase, have a hand in creating the place as well. In ‘Unalienable’, tradition and speculation clash as the state of the nation of Ireland is imagined from 2121. In ‘Scrake’, the final poem in the collection, Belfast’s Black Mountain – that powerless witness of atrocity – sleepwalks after a few too many and crashes on a boy’s bunkbed. In its sleep, it articulates a vision of past and future merged into one: “one child digs up a hatchet, another child picks bluebells.”
If I’ve covered a lot of ground in this review, it’s only a botched attempt at rising to the book’s occasion. I’ve said nothing of McKendry’s creation of an orthography of Belfast dialect (or one of them), complete with an appendix listing its phonotypes. It’s great fun to read and get your head around, although, as before, there’s a political incentive. The continued endeavour for something resembling peace is hard work and it’s undertaken in language which itself is contested. Maybe something like a new language is required, or what only looks like a new language on the surface.
Dane Holt‘s pamphlet Many Professional Wrestlers Never Retire (Lifeboat Press) was the Poetry Book Society’s Autumn Pamphlet Choice 2023. His debut collection, Father’s Father’s Father (Carcanet) is due to be published in 2025.
‘Belphégor, Lord of the Gap, Hell’s Ambassador to France’ is from GUB (Corsair, 2024) – thanks to Scott McKendry and Corsair Books for letting us publish it.
