Donald Campbell’s latest collection of verse, ‘Fugitives’, is a necessarily eclectic one, containing several new poems as well as others that have appeared elsewhere.
Inevitably, the bag is mixed in both tone and subject matter. Some older poems, such as those under the heading ‘The Wonderful World of Ned Holt’ (Holt, a nineteenth century Edinburgh actor turned latter-day John Kay, painted a number of the characters commemorated in these poems) mark the return of familiar friends, and reflect Campbell’s obvious affection for the raffish, lively Edinburgh of former days.
Some of the other work offered here is, however, less effective. Campbell has in the past written extensively in an ‘Edinburgh demotic’ Scots, notably in ‘Cougait Revisited’, the mordantly humourous ‘Betrayal in Morningside’ and his elegy for ‘the people’s game’, thirled to commercial interest.
Sadly, there’s less of both the bite and the fun of these works to be found here, where a more formal tone of Scottish English and a preference for lyric poetry prevails over informality and assonance.
More’s the pity, as far as this reviewer is concerned, although some of Campbell’s newer poems work their charm, as ‘The Water of Leith’ clearly has on the poet, as with other poems recollecting people and places from his past.
Yet it’s this past that seems to hold him in thrall even as he points us toward vistas of sunny uplands in days gone by, seemingly content that other, bolder spirits venture on Parnassus’ more difficult crags.
For some, these are places best left to more experienced adventurers, and for them Campbell offers a voice not often heard nowadays, but one that nonetheless deserves its own particular audience.
'Fugitives' by Donald Campbell Grace Note Publications £7.50 ISBN 978-1-907676-72-7