Contemporary Poetry

environment and space 149

anxiety regarding identity, confi gurations of community and
national affi liations. Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie and Irish poet
Paula Meehan consider the relationship between civic and national
pride and space. For Jamie the narrative is occasioned in ‘Mr and
Mrs Scotland are dead’ by a visit to the detritus of the landfi ll
site.^39 Meehan, by contrast, in ‘Six Sycamores’ considers the nar-
rative space created within St Stephen’s Green, Dublin.^40 Objects
invariably litter the landscape of ‘Mr and Mrs Scotland are dead’.
Old-fashioned ladies’ bags with ‘open mouth spew postcards’
(p. 9 ), and the voices from these missives inhabit the poem. Partly
elegiac, and partly irreverent, Jamie embeds the words as litter in
the environment of her poem. Death becomes a hand dealt ‘fair but
cool and showery’ amid ‘the lovely scenery’ (p. 9 ). Slowly we piece
together that these are the discarded items of the dead. Jamie asks
that we re-assemble the stories of lives in the civic dump. The title
suggests that we can take Mr and Mrs Scotland as an archetype
of an era, and the poem displays nostalgia for a time when com-
munal and local knowledge was commonplace. For example, Mr
Scotland’s John Bull Puncture Repair Kit becomes emblematic of
better days when:

he knew intimately

the thin roads of his country, hedgerows

hanged with small black brambles’ hearts. (p. 9 )

The deciphering of these objects and the lives linked to them results
in an indignant questioning: ‘Couldn’t he have burned them?’
Having found the stamping of ‘SCOTLAND, SCOTLAND’ on
the husband’s joiner’s tools, the questioning becomes emphatic:
‘Do we take them? Before the Bulldozer comes’. Jamie playfully
asks, should we save ‘these old-fashioned views addressed / after
all to Mr and Mrs Scotland?’ (p. 9 ). These lines can be read as
gesturing to the postcard scenes of ‘small Scots towns / in 1960 :
Peebles, Largs, the rock-gardens / of Carnoustie’ (p. 9 ). But
equally these ‘views’ can be interpreted as value systems that may
now seem irrelevant to a conception of nationhood. In a fi nal act of
imagined appropriation the speaker incorporates these objects into
her own domestic space, leaving us in a quandary about whether