The Martian’s Regress

Scotland better be careful: it is in danger of becoming the sci-fi poetry centre of the universe.

Following in the footsteps of namesake Edwin Morgan, Scottish poet J.O. Morgan’s most recent publication, The Martian’s Regress (Cape, 2020), offers a science-fictional account of a Martian’s return to Earth. Although this is a book-length narrative, individual poems work really well as stand-alone texts. ‘The Martian Commutes’ and ‘The Martian Visits the Museum’ would be particularly good texts to look at with a BGE class. They might work best as leads into writing tasks focused on employing features of the science fiction genre.

An exciting Advanced Higher Dissertation might look at Scottish sci-fi poetry, bringing together the work of Edwin Morgan and Don Paterson (in Zonal, 2020) in a comparative study with J.O. Morgan’s poetry in The Martian’s Regress.

Love Minus Love

If cultural magpie Cillian Murphy (of Peaky Blinders and BBC 6 Music fame) tells you to do something, you had better make sure that you do it. During his recent late night show, Limited Edition Vol 3, Murphy described poet Wayne Holloway-Smith as someone ‘you really should look into. He’s incredibly talented’. And he is.

If you want to try-before-you-buy a copy of Love Minus Love, the poet recorded a version of his National Poetry Competition-winning ‘the posh mums are boxing in the square’ for Cillian Murphy’s show (50 mins in).

Love Minus Love is a continuous sequence of poetry (as opposed to distinct poems with titles). This makes it difficult to break the collection down into easily recommendable chunks.

The collection’s title is a mathematical sum that tells us everything we need to know about the speaking voice of the collection who is hurt and traumatised by a painful childhood. The beauty of this collection is the way Holloway-Smith plays with form and tense. For example, the poem’s opening piece is typographically a ribcage, protecting the speaker’s damaged heart. Later in the sequence, the poet manipulates linear time and biography to imagine himself from a distance watching his own mother and father, or to reimagine what might have been. If anything, this collection is for creative writing lessons (as opposed to Critical Reading ones).

At this point, we usually say ‘If you have a Nat 5 class study…’. But we can’t do that to this collection. Just choose the right class to do it with and you’ll know exactly what to do.

Being Various

Being Various (2019), the sixth volume of Faber’s long-running series of Irish short stories, has been guest-edited by acclaimed author Lucy Caldwell (Multitudes, 2016). In it, Caldwell brings together a who’s who of contemporary Irish writers from both sides of the border. According to Caldwell, the selected writers embody the rich ‘variousness’ of Ireland’s current “golden age” in literature. These short stories are most definitely best suited for the upper end of Secondary. Below, are three suggestions from the collection that would work really well at Higher, as either stimuli for Broadly Creative folios or as literature essay texts.

‘May the Best Man Win’, Kit de Waal

In February 2020 it was announced that the BBC are set to adapt de Waal’s debut novel, My Name is Leon (set in the 80s, about a vulnerable child taken into care when his mother is no longer able to look after him). If you can’t wait for that but want to engage with de Waal’s writing in the meantime, use the short story ‘May the Best Man Win’. The author treats us to a cinematic portrait of a Birmingham pub during Muhammad Ali’s last fight. This hyper-masculine setting (manned by a white woman named Patti) is populated by a brilliant cast of men spoiling for an argument.

‘The Adminicle Exists’, Eimear McBride

This stunning short story started life as a miniature play within a radio play, Mouthpieces. In this story, McBride – author of the acclaimed novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing – presents us with the inner voice of a distressed woman seeking help for/with her dangerous partner. Typographically and syntactically, this would be a fairly demanding text at Higher level, but pupils should respond well to the thematic exploration of relationships and our obligations within them.

‘Jack’s Return Home’, Adrian McKinty

This is a story of family feuding and turmoil, aptly summed up by the story’s protagonist, Jack, as a ‘shitty wee regional theatre production of Hamlet’. The action moves between Cumbernauld (where the main character Jack is hiding out) and Belfast, where an overbearing Uncle rules the roost in the wake of Jack’s father’s death.

Here I Stand

Amnesty International brings together a stellar cast of writers, illustrators, activists and lawyers in this anthology exploring the concepts of freedom and fundamental human rights. The collection contains a selection of short fiction, non-fiction essays, poetry, and graphic novels, with each text accompanied by a quotation from its creator outlining the rationale behind it. Helpfully, a teaching note pack is available and free to download on the Amnesty website.

This would be a rich BGE resource, particularly for using with pupils on a National 4 pathway. Start by pairing Chibundu Onuzo’s short story ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ (on the plight of a 14 year old gang member in the criminal justice system) with Amy Leon’s poem ‘Black/White’ (outlining the inequitable life chances of black and white boys). Study these texts alongside the Netflix documentary 13th (exploring the history of racial inequality in American prisons) or the Wilfred Owen poem ‘Dulce’ (looking at the concept of honour).

Alternatively, read all three Jackie Kay poems (on the refugee experience in Scotland) and develop set text skills.

The Wild Iris

The Nobel Prize for Literature is bestowed upon writers for a body of work, a lifetime’s achievement. In 2020, the prize was awarded to American poet and essayist Louise Gluck. In commending the writer’s achievements, the awarding committee described Gluck’s work as having an ‘unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal’. Such praise should be enough to send English teachers running to read her work.

The Wild Iris, Gluck’s 1992 collection, is a breath-taking book of short poems and a brilliant place to start with the writer. In it, the poet describes the life cycle of a garden (both real and allegorical). Personification is deftly utilised as Gluck gives voice to the plants and flowers in order to magnify the beauty inherent in nature’s perpetual cycle of burial and resurrection.

The Wild Iris is unquestionably a text for Advanced Higher, and one that begs to be read as a Literature Study text. However, if you only have time to look at one poem, make it the collection’s eponymous opener, interesting for the economy of language with which Gluck explores universal experiences.

Fury

The sixth collection of poetry from the Ted Hughes award-winning poet, David Morley, is a challenging one. In it, Morley gives voice to traditionally marginalised communities or voiceless groups in society, such as the Roma.

There are three standout poems that would work particularly well as a Level Four study: ‘Romany Wounds Me’, ‘After the Burial of the Gypsy Matriarch’, and ‘Fury’ (a poem based on interviews with the boxer Tyson Fury). The latter poem can be found online. These poems invite further discussion on the media portrayal of marginalised groups, as well as opening up research topics for a piece of discursive writing.

A number of lyrical nature poems within this collection would work well as the focus of Textual Analysis papers at Advanced Higher.

Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass

Lana Del Rey’s debut collection provoked a marmite response amongst literary critics when it landed in 2020. But side-step these critical reviews for a moment and you’ll find a book that could be a fairly useful (if unusual) teaching tool at all levels.

Although you might not want to give over class time to studying these poems in their entirety, use segments, distinct verses, or individual lines to introduce poetic techniques. Particularly obvious techniques favoured by Del Rey throughout are anaphora, assonance, metaphor and sobriquet. Emma Madden’s Vice article (wherein two poets discuss the poetic merit of VBOBITG) is a great starting point for Senior pupils. For example, Advanced Higher pupils could conduct their own roundtable discussion on the collection, as the poets do in the interview.

These poems are rough-hewn: turn this into a lesson by asking BGE pupils to work collaboratively to improve them. Alternatively, draw on the poems where Del Rey’s penned annotations are present to teach skills needed to edit and improve creative writing pieces.

The final section of the book contains a cycle of haikus. Each haiku is paired with an image (found images, photos taken by the singer herself or oil paintings). It has the feel (and bear with me here) of a good old-fashioned Standard Grade Writing paper. Ask pupils to select a haiku-image pairing and develop a short story from there. Great for BGE and Senior Phase alike.

The Historians

Irish poet and literary critic Eavan Boland died in 2020. From her first publication in the 1960s, Boland built an extensive and critically acclaimed oeuvre. The Historians, Boland’s final collection, is a gorgeous final flourish from one of Ireland’s leading literary figures and stands as a testament to her skill in fusing together personal and social histories with myth to explore untold/ignored stories of women’s lived experiences.

As always, there are various ways to use this text in the classroom. Two stand out poems within the collection are ‘Translating the Word Home’ and ‘Our Future Will Become the Past of Other Women’. The former is a Senior Phase text, while the latter (commissioned to mark the passing of a hundred years of Irish women exercising their right to vote in 1918) would make a challenging text to study with an S2/S3 class.

Gutter

Gutter is a literary magazine that promotes high-quality fiction and poetry from writers born or living in Scotland. The breadth and depth of the writing within each volume is incredible and at £14 per year for the subscription (a departmental one, perhaps?) Gutter offers subscribers real bang for their buck. There is so much content in the Autumn 2020 edition (No.22 in the series) that we had to limit ourselves to just a few suggestions.

If you teach dystopian fiction try…

‘The World is on Fire and You’re out of Milk’. In this story – currently available to read on the Blog section of Gutter’s website – humanity is battling (but failing) to keep a natural disaster at bay. This story would work well at Third and Fourth level. If you want to bring poetry into the mix, in a unit thematically linked by the un-natural universe, use the two Hannah Ledlie poems (‘Playing Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and ‘the last park’) in the collection.

If you teach Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Originally’ at National 5…

Use Jennifer Thomson’s thought-provoking essay on belonging and identity, ‘English-ish’. This piece would work well as a RUAE paper or as the launchpad into a piece of personal reflective writing for the Folio.

If you want to look at nature writing…

Use Vicki Feaver’s poetry (‘The River and I’ or ‘Birdsong: Spring 2020’) with Levels Two and Three, or dip into the four previously unpublished poems of Nan Shepherd with Senior Phase classes.  

If you’re doing Personal Reflective writing with Senior Phase…

Read Bethan Dee’s ‘I love Picking My Lips’, an excellent stimulus for writing reflectively about bad habits.

And finally…

Heather Parry’s ‘Do Capitalists Dream of Electric Women?’ is an obvious choice for Advanced Higher candidates looking to practise the old-fashioned art of The Essay.

Reality and Other Stories

If you are looking for an alternative way to teach the conventions of gothic fiction to an S3 class, look no further than award-winning author John Lanchester’s latest collection, Reality and Other Stories. The dust jacket blurb describes the stories within this book as ones ‘to be read as the evenings draw in and the days are haunted by all the uncanny technologies and absurd horrors of modern life’.

This sets us up for the opening story, ‘Signal’, a modern ghost story centred on our addiction to our mobile phones. Another good story for a Level 4 audience is ‘Reality’, where a bunch of millennials are pitted against each other in a reality show that is part Big Brother, part Love Island, and where the rules of the game aren’t explicit for the participants. Lots of discursive/persuasive topics to pupils to get their teeth into here too.

The Nickel Boys

This novel won Colson Whitehead a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is an extraordinary read and deals with complex and sensitive issues throughout. Pitch The Nickel Boys at a Senior Phase audience: it would make for a great Critical Essay text at Higher.

Let me Tell You This

Nadine Jassat is a writer and poet currently based in Scotland. In this collection Jassat explores racism, gender-based violence and familial bonds. The poems contained in this collection would be brilliant to use in the BGE classroom and could be used as stimuli for broadly discursive writing pieces.

The Black Flamingo

Dean Atta’s verse novel is a powerful coming of age story. It has the potential to be used in classrooms as an important Health and Wellbeing tool, dealing as it does with sexuality, identity and race. Passages from the text could be extracted and used as prompts for discussion in PSE classes.

The Actual

Ellams’ debut collection is a masterful exploration of masculinity, pop culture, and contemporary society. The cover artwork (with the word ‘Fuck’ redacted in gold) alludes to the titles of the poems contained within: each poem is titled ‘Fuck / _______’. Although this might hint at a poetic voice that is vexed and indignant (and this is certainly the case), a selection of the poems in the collection are delivered in a voice that is tender, witty, and humourous.

Poems that would work particularly well in the classroom (from S3 upwards) are: ‘Tupac’; ‘Biggie Too’; ‘Shakespeare’; ‘White Saviour Complex’; ‘Perseus’; and ‘45’.

Fleche

Mary Jean Chan’s award-winning collection is a brilliant study in poetic form and extended metaphor. Dip in and out of this book with an Advanced Higher class focusing on poetry for the Textual Analysis paper.

The Lamplighter

First performed as a radio play, Jackie Kay’s play-poem The Lamplighter is a powerful examination of the human cost of slavery and a compellingly told history of the British cities that benefitted economically from this abhorrent trade.

Pitch this play in its entirety to an S3 class preparing for National 5 in S4, or teach it in the form of extracts and deliver at Level 3.

My Darling from the Lions

Rachel Long’s debut collection is a challenging read. Poems on sexual politics, cultural inheritance and family dynamics are delivered with razor-sharp wit and dazzling energy by the poet.

The strength of this collection lies in the poet’s experimentation with and development of narrative voice. Recommend this collection to Advanced Higher candidates looking to develop realistic and immediate narrative voices in their own creative writing.

In These Days of Prohibition

Caroline Bird’s poetic voice is playful and inventive. In her T.S.Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection, In These Days of Prohibition, there are a number of poems that would work really well as prompts for creative writing in BGE. Start with ‘Self Storage’, ‘Public Resource’, ‘The Moment’, or ‘The Military Life of a Maverick Teardrop’. Use the latter poem as an exemplar for personification poem with pupils working at Level 3 and 4.

Poems such as ‘Star Vehicle’, ‘Patient Intake Questionnaire’ and ‘Landscaping’ might appeal to creative writers at Advanced Higher.