Poets and Poems: Michael Pedersen and “Oyster”

Have you told someone “I love you” with the “mechanical bareness of a warden clamping a car?” Have you felt someone’s skin zip around you? Is your moon face full like a Christmas belly? Have you read a poem about a peeping Tom, or about a conversation overheard in the dentist’s office? How about a free personality test administered by the Church of Scientology?

This is Oyster, a collection of poems by Scottish poet Michael Pedersen.

To call this collection jarring doesn’t do it justice. In fact, it’s difficult to come up with a single word of description that does it justice. Irreverent. Provoking. Odd. Disturbing. Funny. Way off. Way out. Creative. Not-like-anything-you-ever-read-before poems. The 48 individual poems often sound (when read aloud) like what you might imagine a gang of Scottish toughs to sound like, including the dialect. They sound like conversations you might imagine young men having, smoking cigarettes as they stand around barrel fires in shady parts of Glasgow or Edinburgh on a cold night.

And then Pedersen wallops you with unexpected tenderness, like in “When Carla Moved Out.”

When Carla Moved Out

Without you I have no butter,
no shampoo, no part of me
that you make happen, empty
shelves, cupboards bare, a soup
of snot for breakfast, a bowling
ball belly. I am glad you took
the silk pillowcase I bought you
from John Lewis. I am sad you left
flamingo slippers I ordered online
– I had to chuck them out.
Their feathers thinned, I grew
tired of sniffing them, my feet
were too bulky. When you moved
out I found another corner
of the room had got
too big for its boots, I stopped smelling
of rain and red playdough.

It’s the tenderness of loss, of remorse, articulated first in the loss of things (butter, shampoo, empty shelves, a silk pillowcase). It’s about the loss of things remaining, like old flamingo slippers falling apart from handling because they’re all that’s left to touch. It’s about a home shared that becomes too big room by room.

Based in Edinburgh, Pedersen has received a number of prizes and fellowships, including a Cove Park Residency, the John Mather Trust Rising Star Award in 2014, and a 2015 Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. He has previously published a poetry collection, Play With Me (2013), and served as editor and contributor for two poetry anthologies, both published in 2015—#UntitledOne: Neu! Reekie! and #UntitledTwo: Neu! Reekie!. The illustrator for Oyster is Scott Hutchinson, the front man for the Scottish indie band Frightened Rabbit.

Oyster is a collection of poems about lives tethered and untethered, of trying to hold things together while you feel they’re coming apart. When you’re finished reading, you’re oddly moved. And moved, oddly.

Related:

The Fountain interviews Michael Pedersen on Oyster

Browse more book reviews

Photo by Rowan Gillette-Fussell, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young, author of the novels Dancing Priest, and A Light Shining, and the newly published Dancing King, and Poetry at Work.

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