Poetic Calm with Return by Minor Road by Heidi Williamson

Many of us will feel we are living through tragic times right now and indeed there is so much that has happened and continues to happen around the world which hurts and scares us.  Far fewer of us will have faced a tragedy such as that witnessed by the community of Dunblane during the terrible primary school shooting.  This shocking event took place over 24 years ago and yet those of us who are old enough to remember will recognise it as something which will never be forgotten.  It remains the deadliest mass shooting in British history.

Heidi Williamson, the author of ‘Return by Minor Road’ was part of the Dunblane community during that time.  This latest collection of her poetry compiled many years later, with the benefit of time, healing and reflection is a beautiful tribute to those who lived and died through it. It honours the memories of those events and recognises the glorious landscape in which it all happened as a place of healing.

The collection which Heidi kindly gifted to me came with a card saying ‘here is Scotland in the post’.  Scotland is without doubt contained within these pages.  As a reader you will be transported into the beauty of the Scottish landscape with a deeper understanding of the healing power of nature when a community has been torn in two. This is evident in Sheriffmuir

In the warm autumn air

we scan for wildlife

tundra hares may come this low

Picking through the undergrowth

we scatter, something breaking

through and into the light

 

Some of the poems are stark and bare, capturing in just a few lines the horror and the grief in the most mundane of ways.

our bike leathers sag against the banister

where yesterday we surrendered them

having chased the light from the roads

There is a depth of feeling and lightness of touch to these poems which move me deeply.  There is a rawness to some of the poems which match the intensity of the situation, and yet the collection is infused with a gentleness of spirit and poetic calm I have rarely seen.

Although this is a collection about shock and loss and grief it is also about healing as seen in Winter River, one of the final poems in the book

Whatever it takes, the river keeps going

The river knows the way beneath the snows

In ‘Its twenty two years and it’s today’  The block of prose captures the long lasting and life changing events of this single shocking event.  It begins ‘you wake at five with out son, leave me to pretend to sleep’  and concludes We know neither of us will sleep.  We put tealights on the table.  Neither of us says why.  We save shouting for the next day.

The intimacy of this poem beginning with a small vulnerable child, so comparable to the children of Dunblane is heart breaking.  .

These poems are intensely moving.  I am not sure how one could begin to make sense of the senselessness of this tragedy and its impact.   However this collections goes along way to bringing some clarity and understanding with an ultimately loving acknowledgement of the enormity of grief loss and longing.

These are important poems and deserve to be read, and re read again and again.