TONGUE STRAMASH (Poems in Scots)

A FIRST FULL COLLECTION, MOSTLY IN SCOTS, WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES IN ENGLISH

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A fascinating journey through language and memory, inviting us to reimagine how we define and understand both.
(Len Pennie, poet)

David Bleiman, stirring in all the rich cultural and linguistic references from a polyglot background, has produced a Scotch broth of a book here, reeking, rich and satisfying. Erudite, tender, on occasions whimsical, Bleiman deserves to be accounted among Scotland’s most versatile and skilful contemporary poets. (Hugh McMillan, poet)

Sich a braw wheen o poyums, David Bleiman’s Tongue Stramash left me a little bit breathless and giddy, heart-wrung and laughing out loud. His sheer delight in the Scots language is evident in every brilliant verse. He explores loss, language, history, place and is not afraid to take on the greats such as Burns and Fergusson. The mixter maxter of Scots and Yiddish in some of his poems further adds to the richness of the collection. This is a book to be relished - a welcome addition to contemporary Scots poetry. (Lynn Valentine, poet)

REVIEW by Guy Walker:

A LOVE-LETTER AND A QUARREL

My review: 'TONGUE STRAMASH’ - poems in Scots' by the Poet in Residence of the Athletic Arms (the Diggers), David Bleiman

It includes lovely Scots lyrics such as ‘Watter-Mooth’ (River mouth) about the exchange of salt-water tides from the Firth of Forth into the mouth of the River Almond at Cramond where David Bleiman lives and his typically cosmopolitan translation of Villon’s ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan?’ which contains the heart-tugging stanza:

Whaur’s the hen in the fox’s maw (mouth)?
Whaur’s thon (that) laddie gane tae war?
An whaur’s the print o the deid dug’s (dog’s) paw?
A bairnie thraws a weet snawbaw, (child throws a wet snowball)
Baith thon craws flichter awa. (both those crows flutter away)

His use of Scots is, in some sense, a love letter to his Scottish home for 46 years. There is love in his tributes to the great poets in Scots, Burns and Fergusson and also in his thorough steeping and high competence in the Scots language.

The title refers to the din, or uproar of languages (to me, rather randomly, a goulash, a stew or simply a ‘bose’) that rings in his ears as a result of his heritage and history making the principal theme of the collection identity. For this reason it will be pertinent later to explore Bleiman’s antecedents and even his name.

A particularly significant ‘poyum’ in respect of identity is ‘Cargaes.’ Bleiman commits an act of piracy on the high seas, perhaps paying a sidelong tribute to it, whereby he hijacks John Masefield's 'Cargoes'. Finding that Masefield's exotic vessels are laden with the 'roostie' (rusty) English canon set out by Arthur Quiller Couch, he chucks the lot, Tennyson and all, overboard in favour of an imagined, raging Scottish poet struggling to get his 'melts (spleen) oan the flet white page'.

This alerts us to the fact that, as well as a love letter, this is, in a sense, his ‘quarrel with himself’ and a tricky relationship with the English tradition in which he finds himself located. Most of his other poetry is written in standard English and this collection shows that he finds that fuel for the quarrel for poetic and cultural identity are complicated things. For example, the Scottish poet and St Andrew's academic, Robert Crawford, in his biography of Burns, tells us that the Bard's favourite poet was one he shared with Byron; Alexander Pope.

On meeting David Bleiman in person and conversing in 'southron', I had lazily assumed him to be English, (he looks like an Englishman, quacks like….etc). His mother tongue is English because he was born in South Africa because Jewish-Lithuanian and Jewish-Viennese/Galician grandparents all made their way there, the latter as a result of the rise of the Nazis. At the age of seven his Progressive party activist father judged it wise to seek and find sanctuary from the apartheid country in the England. As a result 19 seminal, educational years were spent there. Since then he has spent 46 years in Scotland, marrying a Glaswegian but spending most of that time in Edinburgh. This explains the Scots. His Jewishness and the earlier story explain the Yiddish in the collection.

His 'Ma Makaronic Manifest' urges the inclusion of Scots, Yiddish, Polish, Cantonese, Spanish, Punjabi, Urdu and French in his 'clootie cloak' (patchwork cloth). This reminds me of Hugh MacDiarmid's process in 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle' where many European languages pop up amongst his Scots. Bleiman even ventriloquises Robert Burns making Yiddish/Scots 'luv' to a Jewish red rose called Reyzl Gershon. A glossary is provided.

He makes a profession of a certain rootlessness, declaring himself one of Theresa May's 'citizens of the world/citizens of nowhere' and an immigrant. He does not ‘identify’ as English but as British although it has to be said that this might tangle him with the Empire that brought 'Clarty (dirty) Scottish slave ship(s) blawin into Greenock.'

It is in 'Why Dae Ah Screive in Scots?' (Why do I write in Scots?) that we discover that, in David Goodhart's terms, David Bleiman has become a Citizen of 'Somewhere' because '...wurds will wander tae a mooth/whaurivver makars staun and blether.' (words will wander to a mouth wherever poets stand and chatter).
In other words, because we are finite, the piece of geography and geology we hail from or light upon, eventually, always breathes through us. Identity and the need for it are difficult to avoid.