McNeillie's impressionistic picture of a remote landscape explores the existence of evil and the human response to beauty
Nature calls … the Hebridean island of Islay. Photograph: Donald Iain Campbell/RSPB/PA
Critique of Judgement, this week's poem, is by Andrew McNeillie and can be found in his latest Carcanet collection, Winter Moorings. Tracing "a north-western trajectory from the Aran Islands to the Hebrides", the texts are sometimes given a specific location (Lafan, Port Sheánia), sometimes consciously de-located (On Not Sailing to St Kilda) and often situated simply in weather, seascape, time. In other words, McNeillie's poetic loci are more fluid and elusive than the archipelagic topologies they source. Nevertheless, they exhale the strong breath of "place".
The transformation that initiates this poem ("And suddenly the view …") might reflect a traveller's change of perspective, or a particular angle of light, diurnal or seasonal, which reveals a new aspect of the landscape. The artist imagined responsible for these effects is gendered by the pronoun "her" – a neat displacement of the stereotype of feminised earth. Her pastels "blunt" edges and contrasts but find fresh, if shadowy, colours. When the speaker, in a nicely wry descent into colloquialism, declares, "Things for which god knows I'm a soft touch", it's as if he had himself been charged by the "soft touch" of the landscape colourist – who, as we'll see, turns out to be that old chameleon, Dame Nature.
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The transformation that initiates this poem ("And suddenly the view …") might reflect a traveller's change of perspective, or a particular angle of light, diurnal or seasonal, which reveals a new aspect of the landscape. The artist imagined responsible for these effects is gendered by the pronoun "her" – a neat displacement of the stereotype of feminised earth. Her pastels "blunt" edges and contrasts but find fresh, if shadowy, colours. When the speaker, in a nicely wry descent into colloquialism, declares, "Things for which god knows I'm a soft touch", it's as if he had himself been charged by the "soft touch" of the landscape colourist – who, as we'll see, turns out to be that old chameleon, Dame Nature.
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