arts

Poem Of The Week: Tongues Of Water By Niall Campbell

Tongues of Water

We went each Sunday for the mass
recited in my parent’s language
that wasn’t mine. The Gaelic gospel

that was just sound, pure sound, to me.
I rose and kneeled, and listened as
my people traded vowel for vowel;

my whole small world, this flowing water.
Back then, I sat and heard the ocean
in their unknowable call,

that same unknowable response.
My parents stood in the psalm’s current
like waders gone out, as I settled

knee-deep on a second bank,
hearing only the sound of a stream,
believing only the sound the stream makes.

Niall Campbell’s poem of love and identity finds the perfect metaphor for a sense of collective spirituality in the protean ebb and flow of the tide. For the Gaelic psalm singing in the Presbyterian churches that look fixedly out over the Atlantic in the poet’s native Hebrides is bound with the sound and ‘unknowable’ movement of the sea.

And if the oceanic sound of the mixed choirs is not an intended mirror to the water that surrounds them, it is hard not to hear, in the hypnotic heterophonic drag of the vocal parts, the shifting undertow of the currents. The received effect is compelling, as it must have been for the nascent poet whose ignorance of the language of his ‘people’ is overwhelmed in the sonic revelation, the immanent beauty of ‘pure sound’.

Campbell’s skilled use of metre is faithful to the sustained metaphor: the reader infers the slope and roll of the tide in the sometimes regular, sometimes irregular, rhythm. And if his tributary awareness stands adjacent to the subsumation of the parent figures in a sea of faith – they are held firmly in the ‘psalm’s current’ – we are obliged to consider the now-exiled poet’s tangential path, which yet remains ineluctably attuned to the sound the stream of memory and attachment make. Apostolic 'tongues of fire' are quenched and repurposed in the language of water.

‘Tongues of Water’ is taken from The Island in the Sound, published by Bloodaxe Books (2024). The poem is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher.

More information here.

Also by Steve Whitaker...

Poem Of The Week: The Men Who Drive Tractors By Wendy Pratt

Poem Of The Week: Pearl By Stephen Littlejohn

Peace And Desolation: Some Service To The State By Aidan McQuade

Poem Of The Week: Hang By Ian McMillan

Children's Book Review: I Love My Maracas! By Margit Van Der Zwan