Niall Campbell

Apprenticeship

Dusk on the water, the job was to watch,
unracked, the wet still-dripping creels being tipped
into the grading tray, alive with life.

Our seas provided black-eyed velvet crabs
with small horns ridging their top plates. The work:
to grade by size, Those big as a fist, they pointed –

Big as a heart, I saw – were lifted out
as worth a better price. Hours, you would weigh
by hand and eye and a slow part of the mind,

young jeweller at a tray of breathing stones;
arbiter at the filling, refilling box.
The night progressing until the shed light

drew out thick moths. To work was to find yourself
drawn in – or was it drawn back – to something
careful and mysterious, hard-shelled and resistant.

Big as a fist or heart. The same rain falls
on that shed and on this house. I did it five years,
and then did it for the rest of my life.

*

Island Sonnets: Fugay

Bee island. Hive holed in the beach,
their private store of lick-sweet honey
combing strangely in the grit.
Sea-flowers’ hexagon, part sugar

part salt, are gathered and then set.
Scarcity means it all is brought:
primrose nectar, campion,
pink thrift, the nectar of the rock

opening in the surf. Tight flavours
of this half-mile, this closed taste-map.

There are two ways, that I have seen,
to be present. The swelling queen
quivers like a just struck match. Nearby
our basking shark steers through its dark


*

Tongues of Water

We went each Sunday for the mass
recited in my parent’s language
that wasn’t mine. The Gaelic gospel

that was just sound, pure sound, to me.
I rose and kneeled, and listened as
my people traded vowel for vowel;

my whole small world, this flowing water.
Back then, I sat and heard the ocean
in their unknowable call,

that same unknowable response.
My parents stood in the psalm’s current
like waders gone out, as I settled

knee-deep on a second bank,
hearing only the sound of a stream,
believing only the sound the stream makes.

*

Hamelin

I played and started with a little thing
I played the fox’s eyes inside the den

I played the fool and did the fool’s dance
I played the echoes of the underpass

I played until the night rose, the moon fell
I played the sugar’s melt to caramel

I played the field, its sunflower patch
I played with danger in the safety match

I played, it was a slap and a harder kiss
I played, in part, to fill the silences

I played against myself in a shadow-match
I played the cloud-form of the cataracts

I played at cards, at chess, at tic-tac-toe
I played the atom and its afterglow

I played all the good luck, all the bad luck
I played at whisky in the coffee cup

I played, one time, the rats into the stream,
I played, do you follow me, or not follow me?
 

Part I
    13     ‘I am so Happy. I am so Happy. I Loved my Life’
    14    Apprenticeship
    15     Island Sonnets: Fugay
    16     The Sparrow’s Legs
    17     The Night Birds
    18     Inside the Trojan Horse: A War Poem
    19     Tongues of Water
    20     Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage, letter 3
    22     After the Language Deprivation Experiment
    25     A Man Carrying His Own Door
    26     The Night Auditor
    27     Hamelin
    28     Morning Lessons
    29     Three Folk-tale Characters Who Are Definitely Not Metaphors for the Poem
    32     Island Sonnets: Delos
    33     The Death of the Birds
    34     They Have Crept Down,
    35     Barn Owl on Newburgh Road
    36     Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage, letter 6
    37     A Car for Jacob
    38     Island Sonnet: Eriskay
    39     The Cockle-picker
    40     The Salmon of All Knowledge
    42     The Islander as a Theatre Barman Before the Ballet
    43     An Afterlife of Those Who Build
    44     The Flesh Tree
    45     Island Sonnets: Sandy Island
    46     Theology
    47     Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage, letter 4
    48     The Cured
    50     Pastimes
    51     Island Sonnets: Lingay
    52     Learning to Drink Seawater
    53     Lighthouse Keeper, Believing
    54     The Gift

Part II
    57     Life Mask of William Blake
    58     The Harpy of Rubha Meall Nan Caorach
    61     Listening to the Accent of Borges
    62     Houdini
    63     Beginnings
    65     Island Sonnets: The Poem
    66     The Burning of the Bridge
    67     After the Ending of the World
    68     First Fires
    69     From the Devil’s Songbook
    70     Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage, letter 2
    71     Island Sonnets: Mingulay
    72     The Egg Gatherers of St Kilda
    73     The End of Heaven
    75     On the Deep Ocean
    76     Mouse
    77     Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage, letter 1
    78     Rosemary
    79     On the Bone Oracles
    80     Wildness
    81     Lighthouse Keeper, Doubt
    82     Island Sonnets: The Shadow
    83     What is the Poem?
    84     Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage, letter 8
    86     Blackbird Psalm
    87     The Transformed Fight
    88     The Windows
    89     The Nine Billion Names
    91     The Sound

    93     Acknowledgements
    95     Biographical note

Praise for Moontide:

'Niall Campbell to me reveals a rare poetic sensibility, and joyous wordsmith...allied to a singular sensitivity to mood and atmosphere. His muscular phrasing and seductive cadences give his poems a burnished quality; while his perceptions of the natural world here predominantly the land and seascape of Uist - and that of myth...interwoven with insight into his workings as a poet...instil a recurring sense of wonder.' – Stewart Conn, Edwin Morgan Poetry Award Judge

'In his understated debut collection, Campbell, who spent his childhood on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, draws on an intimately known landscape as witness to solitude and shared lives' – Maria Crawford, Financial Times, Summer Books 2014

'With precise language, musicality and insight, Campbell’s first collection explores solitude, companionship and memory against a backdrop of closely observed nature. His intimate poems draw on the seascapes and myths of his native Eriskay, in the Outer Hebrides, but take the same sharp-focused eye to other places, too... Meditative and haunting – my favourite poetry book of 2014 so far.' – Juanita Coulson, The Lady