Neile Graham, THE WALK SHE TAKES

THE WALK SHE TAKES, Neile Graham, MoonPath Press, 2019.

This morning I took a walk across Scotland—and across several centuries—with Neile Graham. She reminded me of something I was told when I visited Chartres Catheral: don’t travel as a tourist, but as a pilgrim. “Why did I leave my shore for another?,” Graham asks in “Atlantic Pacific.” This collection of poems answers that question.

In this excerpt, I don’t know if she is referring to the black dog of depression, but that’s how it resonates with me:

I dare the black dog

to rise out of my bones, out of the shadows
to flicker fey at the edge of my vision.

Offer a vision. Mine/yours/another’s.
Driving along the winding coastline,

marking the bends of the sea
as it shapes the land…

The place names create much of the pleasure here: Machrie Moor, Smailholm Tower, Lockerbie, Inchcolm Abbey, Ring of Brodgar, Kilmichael Glassary. And the unapologetic use of Scots, some familiar, some not: kail yard, cruisie, cottar, cairn. But Graham’s own gift for language, for image, for color, makes up the rest. As in this poem:

Kilchurn Castle Picturesque

Rough waters: steel-blue, white-capped
like the clouds above. Low hills raise the sky,
shade up to hunter green, sage green,
then misty mountain blue. A storybook view
across the loch to where Kilchurn nestles at its edge
etched out against the loch like a hill itself.
Closer, and towers define themselves,
windows yaw and gape,
chimneys dagger a path to the sky.

Above the doorway: 1693 and crowns. A shield.
Ropes twined like snakes and Celtic knottery.
We climb and duck. I pose,
surprised in an archway. A fallen turret
the plinth for a statue my now-dead father becomes,
my mother laughing at us, she who now
has forgotten her life. In my camera Kilchurn’s light
sears this instant into history, true beauty:
grey stone and a span of grace.

—Neile Graham

I have a handful of travel poems myself, and have never known how to weave them into the tapestry of a book. Neile Graham has the answer—stay longer, write more. “When a mile-long walk can take you 5000 years” (“Westness Walk: Rousay”), then why not?

Graham is Canadian-born but a long resident of Seattle. I am claiming her as a kindred spirit. Learn more at MoonPath Press or at her website (lots of links to more poetry): https://neilegraham.com.