Rob A. Mackenzie was born in Glasgow and lives in Leith, Scotland. He has published two pamphlets, The Clown of Natural Sorrow (HappenStance, 2005) and Fleck and the Bank (Salt Publishing, 2012), and two full collections, The Opposite of Cabbage (Salt Publishing, 2009) and The Good News (Salt Publishing, 2013). His poems, reviews and articles have appeared in The Financial Times, The Guardian, Magma, New Writing (Granta/British Council), Poetry Review and Sphinx.
“Today you turn up
five habits to quit for happiness:
criticism, control, complaint, excuses, expectations,
without which you’d be happy, bland
and unbearable.
(from ‘Thirteen’)
Is the attempt to secure happiness worth making? Or is it simply a fast track to inevitable disenchantment? Rob A. Mackenzie confronts such questions in The Good News, his second full collection, but it’s no self-help manual. Fate, faith, travel, love, politics and death are woven into taut, affecting poems, which reveal new layers with every reading: a professional sceptic tries in vain not to become too certain of his own doubt, angels weep in Spanish into their designer coffees, and a hundred Scottish poets are enlisted to articulate the trials and tribulations of their nation at a key point in its history. The book’s central section is a sequence concerning autism’s effect on family life. Poets have written about autism before, but no one has written anything quite like this.
Mackenzie offers a typically versatile collection in style and form, combining an inimitable sensibility and imagination with a secure command of tone. These poems confirm his growing reputation as one of our most intriguing and alluring voices.”
“Rob Mackenzie’s The Good News truly is good news for readers of contemporary poetry. He has a wonderful ear, a wide knowledge of literature in several languages (beyond the Italian he translates from here) and a voracious appetite for the world’s frustrations and rewards. He writes with great intelligence and music, can be politically astute then immediately playful; his work is inventive, humane and welcoming. This book will surely confirm his reputation as one of the best Scottish poets of his generation.”
– Ian Duhig
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The following poems are from the collection’s central section,
‘Autistic Variations’:
Torino in Furs
We persevered with mismatched floor tiles and Rai Due
in our claustrophobic flat;
through the walls the unmistakable sound of Italian
Teletubbies and Sesame Street,
and across the courtyard the young engineer’s CD:
Learn English
from 1950s BBC Newscasters, phrases like ‘I’m sorry,
this is not your shower,
it is my shower,’ decadence we brushed against otherwise
only in the gelateria
of imagination. From antiseptic pillars and ladies furred
for autumn strolls,
the city thrived on appearance and threat: nearly everyone
drove a Fiat,
not usually from choice. We prammed you to the Cafe Zelli
and on your tongue
ritually dabbed espresso, as if this could consecrate you
bilingual more readily
than daytrips to the swing park, where you unflaggingly
cold-shouldered any child
who approached with a ‘Ciao!’ Not that it happened often;
even the Torinese
tots seemed to know that alien kids were best observed
with suitable tact,
that playing among and playing with could appear the same
to untrained eyes:
a whole city with Asperger Syndrome, which is perhaps why
it began to feel like home.
Rai Due is an Italian TV channel.
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But Not Hyperlexic
We read, you watched, and when the time felt right
you made your mark
on nursery, reading a book to an astonished teacher
from start to finish,
aged three. How long you feigned an inability
and how you learned
the intricate decoding from sign to sound,
we never learned,
although we learned the word, hyperlexic, and why
it didn’t apply to you,
and more likely words coding intractable conditions
in root positive.
Half in hope and half with the desperate aspirations
we despised
in parents of young tennis prospects, we imagined
you a savant
decades on: the recitation of Juvenal’s complete works
backwards in Latin
to a packed Royal Albert Hall and no one thinking
dead language
a waste of time. But your intelligence was reserved for
a different world;
this one demanded contact on first name terms,
eye to eye,
to read its script. You feigned interest in learning
the pointless dialogue.
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Routine
Your hot waterbottle is liturgical, the latest ritual
we need to follow
before you fall asleep; waterbottle by your pillow,
waterglass on the wardrobe,
a drawn-out watershed, which elongates in silence
or hours of to and fro –
any excuse to stay awake and see the constellations
demythologise the dark
psalm of the sky. You aim to arrange stray mysteries
the more unruly
the rules become, the more illegible and cracked
a face appears
if reading it is required. But you are more difficult
for us to read
that Proust translated into sixty-seven languages
or gossip mags packed
with undistinguished stars, who span the earth
like water, logged
but hard to account for, with depths and limitations
resolutely immeasurable.
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Consequential Egg
You prefer the murk of details to the vision complete,
incident to plot,
incidental to mainstream. You like books for hilarity
halfway down page 17,
oblivious to consequence. You don’t care who lived
happily ever after
or how a mystery is solved, and closure is important
only for the satisfaction
of completion. All this is why, on the number 12
heading for your ninth
birthday party, I eavesdrop on the conversation
behind us –
how a conceptual artist assembled a giant egg
from ten thousand
eggshell pieces – and imagine you building an egg
from splinters,
each selected according to your personal aesthetic,
fascinated by the fit
they make, the gaps and incongruities, building
patiently for weeks
until an egg the size of a bus wobbles on a tiny cup.
How does it end?
An ending would be a betrayal. Already you have
begun the next egg.
from The Good News (Salt Publishing, 2013).
Order The Good News.
Visit Rob’s blog, Surroundings.
Read Rob’s pantoum ‘The Point’ in The Guardian.
Read ‘Locus-a-Non’ in The Scotsman.
Read ‘Bladerunner’ online at the Scottish Poetry Library’s website.
‘Music, Memory and Subversion: Two Scottish Poets’ Second Books’, Robert Peake interviews Rob and Andrew Philip.
Autism links:
Visit the website of the National Autistic Society.
Contact the Autism Helpline in the United Kingdom.
Visit Autism South Africa.
Contact Autism South Africa.
Look up Autism organisations around the world.
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