Kathleen Jamie on Anon, the first of a series on relationships between dead and living poets.

The Presiding Spirits project was produced by Lavinia Greenlaw for the Royal Festival Hall, London. A number of poets reading at the RFH in Poetry International 2000 were asked to choose a poet, now dead, whom they felt to be an influence, an inspiration or a presence in their work. In collaboration with the RFH, Magma will be featuring a Presiding Spirit in forthcoming issues, exploring the relationship between the living and the dead poet. Anon was chosen as a presiding spirit by KATHLEEN JAMIE.

The history of poetry by women, especially in Scotland, is not silence, far from it. It is a history of defiant, challenging song. Many of our ancient ballads were composed by women, and women sang them down the centuries. They were some feisty women too, who knew that the ballad was the place where women explored their own lives and conditions. Sex, seduction, infanticide, love, death, adultery, and defiance, the ballads tell of them all. Here are murdered lovers, fairies, ghosts, beautiful women and handsome men. Here is ‘Mary Hamilton’ who killed her own baby and met her fate with such aristocratic hauteur; here are ‘The Gypsy Laddies’, the original bit of rough; here too ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’ whose mother-love was so strong it could, briefly, overcome death.

The presiding spirit I’d invoke is just that – spirit. What Scots call ‘smeddum’. And the name of the poets and singers who have transmitted this uncompromising spirit down through the ages? We don’t know. Their name is Anon.

Oh I’ll gie up my houses and my land,
and I’ll gie up my baby-o
and I’ll gie up my own wedded lord
to follow the gypsy laddies-o.

ANON

Kathleen Jamie was born in 1962 in Renfrewshire and lives in Fife. Her poetry has won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award. She has published a travel book, The Golden Peak (1992), as well as collections of poetry which include The Way We Live (1987) and The Queen of Sheba (1994). Her most recent collection, Jizzen, was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Award 2000 and reviewed in Magma 16.

Grateful acknowledgements are due to Kathleen Jamie, the Royal Festival Hall and Lavinia Greenlaw for Presiding Spirits.