Willy Maley's poetry reaffirms humanity's protean potential

The National

6 days ago

WILLY Maley retired from the University of Glasgow in 2024. For over a quarter of a century I worked with him, at times quite closely, co-supervising research students or teaching in the same courses.
He is internationally known as a scholar of Renaissance and Modern literature and a symposium on his retirement gathered a company of brilliant scholars all united in their respect and – more remarkable – their great liking for Willy as a colleague, scholar, teacher and friend. His loyalty to his subject, his students, his profession and colleagues was a constant lodestar quality.
When these new books of his poetry came to my attention, I was immediately delighted and well-disposed to like them. More than that: I was curious to know what his poetry would be like in terms of subjects, techniques, skills and language. As an academic, your knowledge of the great poets and writers might – perhaps should – act as a caution when you try your own hand. As Hugh MacDiarmid puts it, 'Wha hear a Burns or Shakespeare sing, / Yet still their ain bit jingles string, / As they were worth the fashioning?'
So it's a delight to report how good these books are, what a replenishment of positivity they bring, what qualities they endorse and enhance, what strengths they convey, so deeply.
She Wakes Me Up and Other Poems (Edinburgh: Main Point Books) is a collection of love poems dedicated to the poet's wife, Dini. It's difficult to quote from the poems in She Wakes Me Up simply because each one is a singular coherent statement in itself, lyrical or anecdotal, gestural or meditative.
Supplied Short extracts might show up as fragments, extracts, incomplete – which they would be – or else they might appear uxorious. That's a word a reviewer once used of a love poem of my own. It means, 'inordinately in love with one's wife'. It wasn't intended as praise but that's what I took from it, so, running the risk, here's 'Sound Mind' in its entirety:
Sucked in by the sound they make,
I strain to hear the words you say
hear them like they're being sung
through throat, through lips,
through teeth and tongue,
a voice that has your body in it:
warm, earthy, tender, true,
it has in it my childhood streets,
the taste of all my favourite sweets.
The poems note and record 'moves, changes, / years of exile, loss' and all the vicissitudes of almost missing each other, but then there is finding the connection, and 'The Click': 'that jolt when the juice kicks in / between two strokes of the clock' or 'when something becomes / 'suddenly clear and understandable' / like when two people turn out to 'become friends / or be compatible from the outset''. It's something that has been 'lost in time, but there all along'.
Time is the key and the enemy at once. It unlocks the moment and its prospect opens out but it's always coming towards us. Therefore the poems balance love in the moment of discovery with the longer presence of its pleasure and enactment.
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But then, what makes it possible to value it at all is an awareness of its mortal limit, a limit that looms larger for some than others. The poems in this collection are carefully judged neither to exaggerate the personal, biographical or autobiographical story, nor to sentimentalise uniqueness.
They recognise the cyclical, regenerative power love confirms. And they connect that physical, visceral experience with the reading that we all do, one way or another. 'Book For Life' begins: 'I dream that we are working on a book, / or editing, since others play their part' and ends: 'you look at me just as the penny drops. / It's better if the writing never stops.' And 'Future Perfect' plays gently yet profoundly with time, love and lastingness:
Every time we say goodbye
We say hello again
That's our fortune and our trouble.
We live between two times
In memory and in the moment
As in the old days of cinema
When you left halfway through
Saying this is where I came in
One day, the poem wishfully concludes, the future will have become 'The perfect place / for our wishes to come true / And they did, and they do'. In contrast to these personal, delicate poems, there is also a poised discursive application of James Joyce short story 'The Dead' to personal circumstance.
Supplied Scrap Mettle Collection (Glasgow: Seahorse Publications) is a much more varied collection of poems: tributes to a father, a grandfather, reflections on being a stepfather, portraits and praise-poems, observations of people in contemporary society at large, poems about Glasgow and Glasgow's people, meditative perceptions, and sharp explosive squibs of observation, like 'Bookface':
I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by social media
barking hysterical half-baked
dragging themselves
through twitter feeds at dawn
looking for an angry fib.
This goes with 'Twitteronomy', a torrential cascade of a poem listing the negative things a certain form of 'social media' technology enables, to the belittlement of humanity. But if these are outward-facing poems, justified condemnations of one of our society's failings, they also display an understanding of human susceptibility to the temptations of easy self-indulgence. And there are other poems where compassion for humanity carries its power through understatement. 'Covers' deftly evokes the comfort, reassurance and strength that can be given across the generations:
If we came home like drowned kittens
daddy shook our coats out on the landing.
Last night I dreamt I came in soaked to the skin
and he said it's okay son,
just hang your jacket on top of mine,
which was wet through
and suddenly I knew
I wasn't scared of dying.
And there are poems of public pronouncement, including 'Shoeshine on Leith', a splendid short flyting in serious attack mode, revoking the status of Edinburgh as Scotland's 'capital city': 'You curtsey and bow with your overgrown fringe / And a forelock that serves as a cultural cringe / Turning tricks for the tourists with a painted-on smile / You're Scotland with Shortbread, not Scotland with Style.'
It goes on:
Tattooed and adorned with Westminster largesse
you said a loud No when you should have said Yes
while proud Glaswegians and Dundonians
Sneered at the courtesans, pimps and Etonians
Whose favour you curry, you wee Scottie dug
that does a few tricks then soils his own rug.
It concludes: 'By taking the path of least resistance / You've voted yourself out of existence.' In the long aftermath of the 2014 independence referendum, or should I say in the long interregnum between 2014 and Scotland's coming independence, that's a poem that every honest Member of the Scottish Parliament should know by heart. Why did [[Edinburgh]] fail us so badly? What made the people of Glasgow and Dundee so justified in voting Yes? The answers are complex but finally decisive and they challenge the status quo with an absolute demand that this poem encapsulates precisely.
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Some are referential poems, showing clearly how popular cultural idioms and texts win their way into deep moral meanings and forceful understanding, as in 'Let's Go Get Angel', which delivers a universal human sense of commitment, purpose and value picking up from a line in Sam Peckinpah's astonishing 1969 film, The Wild Bunch. The kind of commitment, courage and humility shown in both film and poem connects with another short poem, intensely personal, publicly stated, becoming universal, 'Love and Death':
as in love
so in death
better to leave
than be left
better be gone
than bereft.
Throughout both collections there is humanity and empathy, even in the more angry poems. In 'The Crow's Stone' (the title punning on the exclamation, 'Stone the crows!' – you can work that one out for yourself), the poet tries to help a desperate crow trying to lift a stone with its beak, only to find a millipede beneath it, looking up at him and seeming to say, 'How could you?' Meanwhile, 'Twists and Turns' (a football poem in praise of Tommy Burns, 'the Celtic number 10') is fast, witty and infectiously good-humoured, rippling with fun.
In February and March 2023, I wrote a series of articles in The National about a collection Willy edited called Our Fathers Fought Franco (Luath Press). It consisted of accounts by fathers and relatives of volunteers for the International Brigades fighting Franco and fascism in the Spanish Civil War, including Willy's father. In the first of these I wrote: 'In an era when politics and media seem designed to desensitise people and make us feel cynical about what's most essential, this book is an antidote. Reading it reminds you of the lasting value of care, the common sense of passion, the balance of what's right and must be fought for in this world, and what's wrong, and needs to be opposed.' The words apply as closely to these two books of poems.
I had a few questions for Willy. How did he come to write them? What was that relationship between work as a poet and work as an academic and scholar and professional teacher, a professor of literature?
Alan Riach: Willy, we've known each other as colleagues for more than 20 years but I hadn't read your work as a poet before now. It's such a refreshing renewal of commitment. I can see where the range of reference and the depth of conviction come from, and how they work in poems that are immediate and accessible and yet also packed with emotional investment. Did you come to them fast or were they building up over a long time?
Willy Maley: I came to the poems fast but they emerged as a potential collection over a long period of time, arising from particular events or emotions or conversations. They were initially private communications and reflections never intended for publication. I was always pressed for time, painted to the walls, so it was a case, not of emotion recollected in tranquility, but of emotion experienced in the heat of the moment. I did go back through them, editing and selecting, once the decision was made to do something with these scattered verses.
Alan: The love poems are very moving partly because of the skill with which the lover addressed is so evidently given a life in the poems outwith the imagination and apprehension of the poet. They're never merely projections. Is that self-conscious craft, or intuitive character?
Willy: My lover, wife, muse, addressee is a writer and archivist and artist and diarist in her own right and not as institutionalised or tongue-tied by convention as I had become over the years, so it was never a question of writing as a poet to a mute muse but writing as one lesser writer to a better one.
Alan: The poems in Scrap Mettle Collection are concerned with characters, family, friends, histories of commitment, often struggle, sometimes loss. Sometimes they condemn things that should be condemned. And yet they avoid exceptionalism or egoism. Would you wish them read as tributes, acknowledgements of the achievements of other lives lived, endorsements of specific beliefs?
Willy: I never liked the idea of heroism or used the word, despite the fact that my father was a very ordinary everyday hero in his own way, as was my mother, as are so many working-class men and women. So those poems in Scrap Mettle Collection are tributes, homages, acknowledgements of the small acts of courage or resilience that I admire. My father, for example, was profoundly unsentimental. I'm not but I live in the shadow of that aversion to anything mawkish, even if I still fail to uphold the dry-eyed tradition!
Alan: If there's a mortal sense of loneliness in these poems, in both books, there's equally a recognition of what being human entails, both solitude and the opportunity for solidarity, mortality and a certain knowledge of what continues, goes on living in the carrying stream. If I've got this right, does this bring into alignment and reinforce the reciprocal worlds of the academy and poetry, the scholar and the poet? They're different worlds, perhaps, but surely they're not opposed, and in these books overlapping in the best of ways?
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Willy: The two books were once one, but as it became clear over time that these were distinct poems on love and politics, a decision was made to separate them, and the love poems were gathered together under the heading of Late Life Love, a very particular experience distinct from first love or midlife love. The title She Wakes Me Up was chosen by the publisher Jennie Renton and captured the inspiring nature of the addressee. She wakes me up in every way. Those are private poems made public. None were previously published as poems. The ones now in Scrap Mettle Collection were always public, and some were published. They are occasional verses too, like the love poems. The scholarship or criticism that's always there in the background for an academic definitely played through those poems. The solitary sensibility was never mine. I'm one of nine children and I've always put family, community and class ahead of self. Teaching also plays its part in eradicating any notion of the loneliness of the long-distance researcher or solitary scholar. I taught creative writing for years as a critic and mentor, not as a writer. These late life collections, post-terminal diagnosis collections, have been made possible by retirement. If I was still working, I doubt they'd see the light of day. Being pressed for time made them, and now it's made them public.
She Wakes Me Up will be launched at Waterstones, Byres Road, Glasgow, Thursday, July 24 at 7pm. Please email or call to secure a place: [e-mail], 0141 357 4759. All welcome, entry free.
Scrap Mettle Collection will be launched at Avant Garde, King Street Glasgow, 7pm, Tuesday, August 26. Book available from www.seahorsepublications.com
Willy Maley was diagnosed with terminal cancer in July 2023. His blog posts, including his brilliantly courageous, meticulous and encouraging accounts of living with cancer, can be found at: https://willymaley.scot/2025/07/11/terminal-two-my-second-year-with-cancer/ There, he writes this: 'In August a wee girl fell in the pond in our local park unseen by anyone else, and as I waded in to rescue her I had a fleeting thought: maybe I've been spared to do this one thing. The butterfly effect.'
It's a heartening episode, and undeniable. These books only expand upon the sense that there are miracles of serendipity, possibilities that we have been given to live up to. The butterfly effect is everywhere. Wole Soyinka, the African Nobel laureate, wrote in a book entitled Beyond Aesthetics: Use, Abuse and Dissonance in African Art Traditions (2019): 'The primary objective of art is to constantly reinvent itself, its own modes of expression and representation. The objective of art is also to be chameleonic and protean – that is, to change shape and colour at will, to supersede both reality and expectations. Yes, indeed, the goal of transformation is not only desirable, it is an integrated element of what art does.'
Soyinka's words are apt to remember when we read Willy Maley's poems. They are reinventions, reaffirmations of humanity's protean potential, revelations of openness to all that's best in our marvellously chameleonic capacity to 'supersede both reality and expectations' – and to be transformative.