Annie Fisher reviews Surprising the Misses McRuvie by Eleanor Livingstone (Red Squirrel Press, 2023)
Sit yourself down somewhere quiet to read these poems and take time with them. They don’t make a big noise, but they’ll seep into your mind. I found them beautiful, sensitive, and full of insight.
The pamphlet opens with a perfectly chosen epigraph from Blake: The busy bee has no time for sorrow. Eleanor Livingstone was Director of Scotland’s Stanza Festival for twelve years. It’s such an impressively well-organised festival that it’s easy to imagine how running it (and promoting the work of other poets) would leave no time for sorrow, or anything else. I’m amazed she found the time to write at all, but this pamphlet allows twenty-five of Eleanor Livingstone’s latest poems their own well-deserved spotlight.
The poems are elegiac and wistful, but with an energetic, purposeful sense of taking stock and journeying forward. There’s a poem about moving house; there are three ‘in memoriam’ poems; and several ‘train’ poems. Here’s the opening and the ending to ‘The Stationmaster’s Wife’:
At the tail end of each day
he and I lay down as one,
a shiver in our bones,
the brass bed trembling
as the midnight sleeper approached.
[…]
till the kids moved out
and the trains came less and less.
Then he went too, steady to the last
but fainter and fainter,
his signal fading into the dark.
The intriguing title, Surprising the Misses McRuvie refers to two of Eleanor Livingstone’s High School teachers (for Games and Literature) who would, Eleanor Livingstone thinks, be surprised to see where life has taken her. The teacher who made her “learn by heart” the ancient Scottish ballad ‘The Twa Corbies’ and Shakespeare’s ‘The quality of mercy …’ speech would be “floored” to see her running a poetry festival, and as she sprints full pelt from a poetry reading to the station and just makes the train, she remembers the games teacher who “would have choked on her whistle / if she’d seen me doing that.”
… beautiful, sensitive, and full of insight
Some poems put me in mind of Michael Laskey in the way that apparently straightforward observations of the everyday hold layers of resonance. This is from the opening poem, ‘Preview’, which is about a house move. As Eleanor Livingstone packs for the move, she recalls her mother:
[…] taking to bits
her trusty Kenwood Chefette, which worked
perfectly well. Arranging the parts carefully
on a table, brushing away a decade
of stale crumbs and stoor
and never being able to put
all the bits back together again.
There’s a lot wrapped up inside those lines (excuse the packing pun). The word ‘stoor’ for a start. It’s a Scottish dialect word that can mean dust but can also mean fuss / turmoil / strife / conflict. And of course, the whole image is a metaphor for the irretrievable. It’s a theme picked up in subsequent poems – in ‘Dr Beeching’s Axe’ for example, which describes the ‘60’s railway cuts, when miles of track were ripped up:
Only the path remains,
its rumbling memories
encroached with weeds
and narrower each year.
There’s an acute awareness of transience – like the red eyes of a fox caught in headlights (in the poem ‘Brush’), life goes “in a blink”. In the poem ‘Affidavit’, a three-year-old child is suddenly grown and striding off into her future. And in the poem ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, a mother, cruelly taken by Alzheimer’s, leaves behind an unfinished tapestry, her life disappearing “between those two stitches in the middle of a row”.
But alongside a sadness for what is lost there’s an appreciation of good fortune. This is from the poem ‘Derailed’:
Side by side, comfortable
in the ‘quiet coach’, we watch
as time slips by
[…]
until with shrieking,
glass, metal, screams, the world
comes off the rails, tumbles
down a steep embankment.
Our seats are not at the front,
we’re upright, if shaken
Having quoted from ‘Derailed’ I’m aware that it’s something of a travesty to pick out lines. It’s another poem that condenses a lot into a short space, and you really need to read it all. Indeed, the whole pamphlet is well worth reading. I was very moved by it and loved its subtle music. Its publication coincides with a revised edition of Eleanor Livingstone’s much-acclaimed first collection, Even the Sea, also from Red Squirrel Press.
Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: Infinite in all Perfections (2016) and The Deal (2020). She is a member of Fire River Poets, Taunton.
