‘most ordinary and commonplace’
The Firth is the Firth of Tay, half-land and half-water, with its own people, birds and plant life. John Glenday’s poems are quiet in tone, as though listening to every change in the natural world and in everyday lives. I could say that they are about small things, or that they are inward-looking — and they are, except that these small things are universally worth attention.
Weeds and wild flowers, those un-showy underfoot plants — there are five poems with the simple title ‘wild flower’. The first (a prose poem) doesn’t even name the flower (‘happed in the shabbiest of Scotland’s colours; built to be often stepped on, never picked’). But it is unique, a small marvel in itself: ‘and yet those roots — how widely they spread, how deeply they run — now there’s a thing no one will ever understand.’
The bird’s foot trefoil is named, and pleads for our attention. Although these plants are ‘most ordinary and commonplace’ and ‘all seem quite alike’, they have a deep sense of their own reality, their own value. The poem ends: ‘look at us as we deserve to be seen; it won’t be a waste of time; in fact, it might just change your life.’
People, too, can be ignored. The fifth ‘wild flower’, is written in the voice of the rayless mayweed, describing Glenday’s father, moving from job to job as the factories close —
each time he was rooted out from his workplace
in his flat cap and tweed coat, laid off from the warehouse
or the factory going under
There’s a sense of inevitability as industries decline, and the human waste that goes with it. Just behind Glenday’s father is the undistinguished mayweed, at home in ‘the cleared // concrete forecourts and bulldozed yards […] like him, so ordinary and despised’:
both of us nothing much to look at,
though we held our heads up as best we could despite it all,
him in his particular way and me in mine.
The ordinary is never commonplace in these poems; it is as rooted as plants and people in their own place and with their own kind. The tenderness and love for the natural world shown in these poems might, like the bird’s foot trefoil, change your life.