poyums annaw, by Len Pennie review: 'hugely entertaining and intelligent'

These objections range, she observes, from a dislike of enjambment - the practice of allowing a thought or phrase to run on from one line of poetry to the next - to general accusations of vulgarity and sweariness. And it’s just as well that Pennie is forearmed against critics; because even before its publication date, her new collection poyums annaw was plunged into controversy by a brutal review in The Times describing her as “Scotland’s worst poet since McGonagall”, accusing her of cynical posturing as a woman of the people, and - much more damagingly - suggesting that she might have plagiarised her poem about the doomed 1950s Soviet space dog Laika from a recent poem on the same theme by Sarah Doyle.

On the charge of plagiarism, it is true that two lines of Pennie’s poem Good Girl, including the final one, echo the same thoughts as Doyle’s. Doyle’s poem, though, is a short lyric reflection, whereas Pennie’s is a longer rhythmic monologue written in Laika’s own voice, and full of intense dramatic irony. Both poems also take their place in a large existing international literature of Laika poems, many of which seem to share thoughts and imagery.

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As for the charge of cynical posturing, this is based on the contention that no-one who has a first class degree from the University of St Andrews, as Pennie does, could ever have been made to feel “thick” at school because she spoke the wrong way and came from the wrong culture; an idea which shows a painfully limited understanding of Britain’s class system.

And the notion that Pennie resembles McGonagall, in her poetic efforts, is superficial at best. It’s true that she likes steady, cantering rhythms, and often uses rhyme in ways that give some of her poems - particularly the happier ones - a slight atmosphere of Patience Strong, the famously platitudinous popular poet of Woman’s Own magazine. McGonagall, though, made himself ridiculous with his failed attempts at lofty spiritual rhetoric, and his poor command of metre and rhyme; whereas Pennie never attempts the former, and has perfect and often ingenious control of the forms she adopts, whether we like them or not.

In truth, this collection’s gravest real weakness is probably the element of repetition involved in Pennie’s continuing struggle to move on from the terrifyingly abusive relationship she survived a decade ago, and from the failure of the criminal justice system adequately to punish her abuser.

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Even here, though, her many reflections on the subject - about 25 of these 67 poems - achieve an impressive variety of rhythms and a memorable intensity, particularly when read aloud. And what lifts Pennie above the current throng of self-absorbed young artists is her seemingly effortless ability to pivot from the personal to the wider political issues implicit in her experience, and to the state of the world more generally.

This collection contains, for example, a few fine poems on the obsessive beauty culture that preys on young women’s minds in the age of the Instagram selfie; and a sharp and brilliant one, Oor World’s On Fire, about the nonsense of corporations which are burning down forests and pumping out carbon emissions on a massive scale, trying to guilt-trip individual consumers over their rubbish recycling.

Pennie’s poems are undoubtedly designed more for performance than to languish prettily on the page, and that may limit their appeal for some. To those who are happy to enter Pennie’s world of rhythm and rhyme, though, they offer a hugely entertaining and intelligent young woman’s perspective on the world we currently inhabit; raw, down-to-earth, and certainly enlivened by a few expletives - but downright “bad”, it seems to me, only in the eyes of those whose expectations of poetry are suffocatingly conventional, and very narrow indeed.

poyums annaw, by Len Pennie, Canongate, £14.99

*This review originally described the poem “Your Poetry is Shit” as having been written in anapaestic heptameters. It is in fact written mainly in iambic heptameters, and the review has been amended accordingly.

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