Andrew Philip

If you've been following Andrew Philip's cyber-tour of his collection The Ambulance Box, or if you've met the man himself, you will probably encounter the poems themselves as strangely familiar. 

For while they are deeply observational and experiential, such that he describes his approach as "use your ears, trust your ears and cut", it is the quiet, passionate insistence of his 'way of saying things' that stops the reader in his tracks. 

This poetic sensibility emerges whenever he writes as he does here on boxologies for the first time, and it is the crafted but relentlessly personal voice that I find most exhilarating about his poetry: a confident vulnerability that gives of itself because there's no doubt in his mind that it matters.

In this way his voice is not just the medium of these poems' transmission, rather it is the black ink that preserves the finger-prints of his experience, much as hearing Paul Robeson sing Ol' Man River imbues the song with meaning born of a thousand stories.

So his tragic bereavement, his pursuit of truth, his experience of language as power are parts of his story but it is the voice that has been forged by these experiences, in which these experiences and observations are retold, and through which they are refracted which elevates them and makes them irresistible.

Q: The title poem 'The Ambulance Box' refers to those who, disabused of any notion of wholeness, and “huddled/ round our various wounds/ are at home with the box”. Is this a description of your own engagement with grief?

A: It certainly emerges from my engagement with grief, but it’s part of a broader life experience than that. The absence of wholeness in this world has been in front of my nose from the start, not least because my older brother is autistic. That meant I grew up having regular contact with people with physical and learning disabilities of various kinds and many levels of severity. Nonetheless, the death of my son Aidan shortly after he was born brought home to me in the strongest way possible how false any notion of wholeness in this world is. You could also view that poem as an exploration of the beatitude “Blessed are those who mourn.”

The line about being “at home with the box” indicates acceptance not only of our grief and brokenness but of the richer life that comes through engaging with it. I still rail against the unfairness of having had to bury my son—there are other poems in the book that explore that—but my life is all the richer for everything I’ve learnt, the people I’ve met and the greater closeness that I’ve developed with certain friends as a result of facing the loss head on.

Q: You've created a kind of internal dialogue between three voices in your use of English, Scots and Gaelic - three voices, one identity. Bearing in mind the global dominance of English and the decline of Scots and Gaelic, is there a political energy to this Trinitarian interaction?

There certainly is. There’s obviously the well-trodden path of trying to make the two lesser-used languages visible and grant them equal status to English in the poetry. However, there’s also the desire to disrupt the texture of standard English—the global language—with the Scots and Gaelic words. It’s a way of resisting that empire, to use a word that some may find controversial, and saying that I don’t identify with or belong to it entirely.

I like the way your phrase “Trinitarian interaction” anchors that element of resistance in a Christian context and gives a it spiritual underscore. Not everyone would recognise that or its relationship to the political, but that’s fine. It’s certainly part of the foundation for the writing.

It’s worth pointing out that English and Scots are part of my upbringing, so it’s natural for me to use them. Gaelic, by contrast, is a language I’ve been learning off and on over the past nine years, so its use is more conscious. I’m not yet anywhere near the stage where writing in Gaelic is as natural as writing in the other two.

Q: So has your work amongst politicians influenced your poetry?

A: You might say that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.

My day job in the Scottish Parliament official report is very much focused on political language, and I don’t think it’s controversial to say that political language is somewhat lacking in poetry! Barack Obama is an exception, but I can’t think of anyone in this country who can match his oratorical skill. I’ve written two poems at most that have any direct connection to the day job, but if working in that milieu has done anything for my poetry, it has sharpened my desire to write with economy.

Q: “As we cool/we harden” you write in “The Road from Emmaus”. Motion, dynamism and journey together comprise a key theme of this collection, both in terms of form and content. What are the ‘cooling agents’ in your sights here, against which the poet or the pilgrim or the activist must remain hot?

A: Well, actually, that image is intended to communicate something more ambivalent: the comparison is to “red-hot iron hammered into shape”, which, although it must go through the red-hot stage to be formed, comes into its own only once it cools. There is an element of regret at passing from the red-hot stage to the hardened but there’s also a recognition that the hardening is a necessary part of growing and becoming what one is meant to be. So it’s still part of the journey, just a different phase. Those lines also reinvent or open up the Biblical image of the furnace, which is a commonplace of contemporary Christian worship songs.

Q: Your closing poem implies the necessity of saying the impossible-to-say. Is this a fundamentally religious position?

A: It’s a fundamental position for me a poet, certainly, and set in a deeply religious context, but I don’t find it easy or necessarily helpful to disentangle the religious from the aesthetic in the way your question might imply is possible. There’s also a lot of silence in the poems. “Poetry is only there to frame the silence,” says the poet Alice Oswald, and I imagine the Trinity as having silence at its heart: a profound, holy, loving silence that’s not the absence of noise but an intense kind of presence.

Q: How would you review Andrew Philip’s poetry?

A: At the risk of sounding evasive, I’d have to say it’s not for me to review my own work. But if asked to describe it, I would say I hope it’s poetry that engages the heart, the head, the eye and the ear; poetry that will draw you back with its music, its mystery and its power. And although there’s a strong religious element to it, I hope the non-religious reader can find pleasure and richness in it. So far, the reactions I’ve been getting indicate that it’s doing pretty much what I intended.

Andrew Philip's cyber-tour continues at Robert Peake's blog, 8 July.