Afore a Nicht Oot

About this poem

This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2020. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The Scots editor in 2020 was Thomas Clark.

Some makars hae the lug o a speaker, and some hae the lug o a scriever. Paul Malgrati, but, has baith – his byspiel poems are alive tae Scots no jist as it IS, but as it could be. There can be a sense, in Scots, o poetry as a kind o wird gemme, a tentie bit o Feng Shui, re-arrangin an thereby optimalisin oor limited vocabulary. A puzzle tae be solved for x. Paul Malgrati raxes faur ayont thon clased systems. His poems pulse wi possibilities, ilka wird a hingin threid rinnin aff tae… weel, wha kens whaur. Nostalgia is a bonnie thing, an wha kens whaur the Scots language wad be withoot it. But this is poetry that pynts no whaur we’ve been, but whaur we’re gawin.

Author’s Note:

I wrote these lines in my Dundee flat, on a cold December afternoon. They ran longer, originally, but then tightened around their core impulse, exploring that odd feeling of disclosure, before leaving one’s home for a night out, when the intimate threshold of the world indoors opens on the cheerful, yet jarring outdoors. The poem came to me in Scots —my chief poetic tongue. It blends Scottish words, including the rarer words ‘tirrivees’ (stirrings) and ‘souches’ (‘sighs’), with personal references, albeit from further afield. Lapsang Souchong, a Chinese black tea, is my parent’s favourite; it conveys very personal, homely memories and yet, it also encapsulates that desire of the unknown, that longing for tiptoeing novelty and reeling laughter which sometimes seizes us before meeting friends and strangers in town.