Poetry review – SKAIL: Colin Pink feels the weight of Richie McCaffery’s perceptive but downbeat collection
Skail
Richie McCaffery
New Walk Editions, 2025
ISBN 978-1-7392812-7-4
£7
‘Skail’ is a Scottish word meaning to disperse, scatter or spill and the meaning of this word echoes through the pamphlet. The title poem describes the belated scattering of a father’s ashes in a family garden where the ‘great grandkids / he never knew used little grain scoops / to lace the plant pots of the back garden with him’. Later, the mother unceremoniously dumps the rest of the ashes in a vegetable bed and the poem ends:
And though it was a wet night, the dust cloud of him
hovered under the streetlamp, as if getting its bearings.
McCaffery’s latest collection is loosely in two parts. Most of the first half continues the theme of lost love and the aftermath of a broken relationship which was the main theme of his previous full-length collection Summer / Break, reflecting the struggles of the author in dealing with feelings of loss. The inability to come to terms with lost love is strikingly depicted in “Heft”:
Since she’s gone he feels the full heft
of her. He goes out in the street like one
of those Edwardian divers in brass helmet
and lead shoes, lumbered down to inspect
the wreck, over and over.
The image of the old-fashioned diving suit is a perfect way of capturing the weight of loss. But it’s that last ‘over and over’ that gives such a painful conclusion to this poem, as if the narrator is trapped in a hopeless Sisyphean task of remembrance.
“Cicatrix” (the word means scar) conveys the feeling of sudden rupture in the relationship by drawing a parallel between a scarred tree that has lost a branch in a storm and the framed photos of himself that his partner used to have on her desk: ‘He never heard the wind changing / Before he knew it, he was out of the frame’.
In “Woodwork” the narrator’s sleepless body, tossing and turning, is compared to ‘splintery wood on a lathe, / becoming less and less of what it was / and more of something else.’ It’s a fascinating metaphor that has, simultaneously, a negative and positive message, losing part of the self but also becoming something new.
In the second stanza, the narrator remembers how, in happier times, the couple used to spoon in bed (using the word lepeltje meaning little spoon in Flemish, his partner’s native tongue) and in the final stanza the focus shifts to old pine doors that at times ‘cry sticky topaz tears / for what they were once, for where / they have come from and to’.
The second part of the collection meditates on family, place and death; for instance in “Psychiatry”:
He always attributed the mood-weather
in his family to the fact they dressed
mostly in vintage clothes, absorbing
the temperaments of maybe-dead bodies.
This striking thought becomes more chilling the more you dwell on it. In “The Way” drinkers at a wake in a pub distract themselves from death by complaining about how hard it is to find the entrance to the new crematorium. In “Bolt” the narrator gets off a bus, sees teenagers with their phones and a sudden flash and thinks they are photographing him only to discover it was lightning: ‘That’s being human – / one instant so full of self, the next / made to feel like no-one, nothing.’
McCaffery has a number of poems in which a physical object is invested with multiple poignant resonances: a grandfather clock, an ink bottle, a lucky penny that turns out to be a half-sovereign, a Victorian beer fount that no one left alive knows how to repair and a wind-chime in a cemetery that sounds like a spooky bicycle bell:
The chime rings again, though
there’s no breeze and today
you’re glad to be a straggler.
In “Street Turn”, a description of a busker, McCaffery captures the intensity and risk of song (and maybe by extension poetry) in his observation of a man singing with his eyes shut:
At first it seems like he’s just
rummaging in his skull for the lyrics –
maybe they’re printed on the back
of his eyelids – but as the song goes on
he tightens them, as if bracing
for some sort of crash
The above is a good example of how skilful McCaffery is at torqueing up the emotional intensity of an everyday scene.
Taken in one gulp (as by a reviewer?) the cumulative effect of the collection, although acutely perceptive, can be rather lowering to the spirits. In the words of T. S. Eliot ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality’. But we should also keep in mind that Eliot also said: ‘This is one moment / but know that another / shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy’. I like to think that that piece of wood on the lathe will emerge turned into something beautiful. There is a great deal to enjoy and ponder in this finely accomplished pamphlet, which I would advise is best read in small sips, like a fine malt whisky.
Oct 23 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Richie McCaffery
Poetry review – SKAIL: Colin Pink feels the weight of Richie McCaffery’s perceptive but downbeat collection
‘Skail’ is a Scottish word meaning to disperse, scatter or spill and the meaning of this word echoes through the pamphlet. The title poem describes the belated scattering of a father’s ashes in a family garden where the ‘great grandkids / he never knew used little grain scoops / to lace the plant pots of the back garden with him’. Later, the mother unceremoniously dumps the rest of the ashes in a vegetable bed and the poem ends:
McCaffery’s latest collection is loosely in two parts. Most of the first half continues the theme of lost love and the aftermath of a broken relationship which was the main theme of his previous full-length collection Summer / Break, reflecting the struggles of the author in dealing with feelings of loss. The inability to come to terms with lost love is strikingly depicted in “Heft”:
The image of the old-fashioned diving suit is a perfect way of capturing the weight of loss. But it’s that last ‘over and over’ that gives such a painful conclusion to this poem, as if the narrator is trapped in a hopeless Sisyphean task of remembrance.
“Cicatrix” (the word means scar) conveys the feeling of sudden rupture in the relationship by drawing a parallel between a scarred tree that has lost a branch in a storm and the framed photos of himself that his partner used to have on her desk: ‘He never heard the wind changing / Before he knew it, he was out of the frame’.
In “Woodwork” the narrator’s sleepless body, tossing and turning, is compared to ‘splintery wood on a lathe, / becoming less and less of what it was / and more of something else.’ It’s a fascinating metaphor that has, simultaneously, a negative and positive message, losing part of the self but also becoming something new.
In the second stanza, the narrator remembers how, in happier times, the couple used to spoon in bed (using the word lepeltje meaning little spoon in Flemish, his partner’s native tongue) and in the final stanza the focus shifts to old pine doors that at times ‘cry sticky topaz tears / for what they were once, for where / they have come from and to’.
The second part of the collection meditates on family, place and death; for instance in “Psychiatry”:
This striking thought becomes more chilling the more you dwell on it. In “The Way” drinkers at a wake in a pub distract themselves from death by complaining about how hard it is to find the entrance to the new crematorium. In “Bolt” the narrator gets off a bus, sees teenagers with their phones and a sudden flash and thinks they are photographing him only to discover it was lightning: ‘That’s being human – / one instant so full of self, the next / made to feel like no-one, nothing.’
McCaffery has a number of poems in which a physical object is invested with multiple poignant resonances: a grandfather clock, an ink bottle, a lucky penny that turns out to be a half-sovereign, a Victorian beer fount that no one left alive knows how to repair and a wind-chime in a cemetery that sounds like a spooky bicycle bell:
In “Street Turn”, a description of a busker, McCaffery captures the intensity and risk of song (and maybe by extension poetry) in his observation of a man singing with his eyes shut:
The above is a good example of how skilful McCaffery is at torqueing up the emotional intensity of an everyday scene.
Taken in one gulp (as by a reviewer?) the cumulative effect of the collection, although acutely perceptive, can be rather lowering to the spirits. In the words of T. S. Eliot ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality’. But we should also keep in mind that Eliot also said: ‘This is one moment / but know that another / shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy’. I like to think that that piece of wood on the lathe will emerge turned into something beautiful. There is a great deal to enjoy and ponder in this finely accomplished pamphlet, which I would advise is best read in small sips, like a fine malt whisky.