Review: ‘Poyums’, by Len Pennie

Poyums, Len Pennie. Canongate, 2024, hardback, 116pp. ISBN 978-1-80530-138-7. 

Len Pennie is a young Scottish poet writing in English and Scots, a journalist, and an active advocate of the Scots language. She is well-known on social media, as a result of which she has had to put up with a lot of pestering that goes beyond banter. Small wonder that her poems can be sharp, aimed, and delivered on target. The simple design by Valeri Rangelov on the front cover of the book could strike you as a stylised tulip, but in fact it’s a flaming match, and that says something about how Len Pennie works as a poet – she uses the seductive devices of meter and rhyme, she uses her gentle wit, until suddenly ye ken fine ye’ve been telt! “You are not poetry,” she says, “you’re just a man, neither stanza, verse, couplet nor line; I did not write you, get the fuck off my page, there is nothing about you that is mine.”

It isn’t often that I make a point of pre-ordering a book of poetry – or any book, for that matter. I made an exception for Len Pennie’s Poyums. 

Does meter and rhyme work for her? It’s an old dodge, it has been done to death, but it works for John Cooper Clarke, it works for Linton Kwesi Johnson, it works in rap. When the ancient Greeks invented iambic pentameter, they did so because a line could be easily remembered and delivered in a single breath. That’s the strength. However, to someone reading, say, Richard Siken or Oisín Breen it’s outmoded, and that’s the weakness. Sometimes Len Pennie has to tinker to make it work. A line like “but when soap’s been rinsed off and I’m all nice and dried” scans perfectly, but makes the reader feel like maybe the syntax lacks a definite article somewhere; it certainly made me read it over twice. This is why – bear with me – I love to hear Len read her poetry aloud more than reading it for myself. I’m too bloody critical, which comes of studying literature. I sit there counting metric beans, waiting for a poet to hirple. But then along she comes and bowls a googly with enjambement, rhyming “ways he” with “crazy,” and that’s no mis-step but rather a wee skip and a dance, and I have to smile.

Lemn Sissay is quoted on the front cover as calling Len “a poet who redefines what poetry is and who it is for.” Is that a fair comment? Well, poetry can say things that, somehow, prose would never allow to be said; it can say things that would simply sound snide or like invective; it can be polemic, but because it is also entertaining you can kid yourself it isn’t. Len takes on issues such as spite and violence toward women, issues that I thought society was getting over. But it isn’t. I’m seventy-three and I have never known a time in my life when there has been such racism, sexism, and gender-hatred. So no matter how entertaining her poetry is, it is not here for entertainment. It is polemic. 

I’m going to leave you with my favourite verse. It’s not from her most hard-hitting poem, but on the second and third reading of it you do feel the jester’s bladder bash you round the back of your head. This is perhaps where Lan Pennie’s talent really lies – like a medieval court jester she is allowed to speak truth to power without fear of punishment. Her poem ‘The Library’ starts by inverting: “What if stories told us? What if books read us back?” The final verse goes:

So I sat at my typewriter, writing my wrongs,
And putting each book back where each book belongs.
And as each shelf was filled with the pages I chose,
Like the sunset in exile, my library rose,
And with each tome handcrafted, from paper to spine,
My library’s open, and the stories are mine.
I own my own narrative, rewrite the start,
Delved inside the ashes and salvaged my heart,
And though far from idyllic, I do not intend
To abandon my book till I’ve written the end.

Poyums is a book not to abandon until you have read it to the end, and maybe picked it up again from time to time.

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