Part-Truths  

Part-Truths
Poems
Michael Pedersen

Koo Press 2009
Koo Press Chapbook Series - No. 28
koopoetry@btinternet.com
www.koopress.co.uk

One of my purposes as founding editor of The Eildon Tree was to enable what my colleague Ian Macaulay called “an incursion into print.” It was hoped that many new (not necessarily young) poets would publish their first work in its pages and then be encouraged to seek later publication in the wider poetry world. Not only did this benefit the poet, it benefitted the magazine with newer (yes, often young) voices whose work enriched the magazine with freshness and vibrancy. I think The Eildon Tree has kept to its promise over the decade. Michael Pedersen might also typify the kind of poet the magazine had/has in mind. Scottishness never was a criteria for inclusion but Michael, growing up in Edinburgh (Leith then Portobello) studying in Durham, and now living and working in Cambodia, embodies the more universal aspects of a magazine rooted to a place but reaching out into the wider poetic world. Here new poet does mean young for Michael is 24.

My blurb is on the back of this excellent wee chapbook and I stand by it:

“His poems are accomplished and memorable...full of original images and sensuous detail.”

So those poems were and are. Once a reader is convinced any poet is technically capable then the real fun begins. We can enjoy the poems for what they are: glimpses of the poet’s life, his travels, and his concerns. Whether being aware of both love and the gecko witnesses on the wall (“Flowers”) or in (“John”) where a dying man is bleeping “like a dying smoke detector” this young poet avoids sentimentality and thus lets his poems and people be themselves, not objects of curiosity or pity. What I also like about Michael Pedersen is that he appears at home everywhere and this also makes for a curiously rooted but rootless poetry, which again, lets his people and places be themselves.
From a dying friend to an otter to the deeply sensuous “Contrasexual Cuddles” Pedersen handles all his poetic subjects with skill and ease.

I was most touched by his tribute to the late Tom Buchan, who died when Pedersen was probably about ten years old. I knew Buchan some, mostly by hearsay. I saw him only a few weeks before he died tragically by his own hand. Pedersen is spot-on about a man he could never have met:

“Tom wrote poems like fantastic pointing fingers,
‘straight strong and complex’
as Glasgow.

Tom wrote pulsing prose with pursed lips,
Served verities caked in salt, bent rules
beautifully;

was captain of a body well lived in,
chipped teeth, fractured bone; but enough
about his vessel...”
(from: Tom Buchan 1931-1995)

Pedersen has captured the man well, yet mostly from his imagination--- the marker of any good poet.
Pedersen continues:

“He moved as a great touring caravan, compass pointing
alpine north. Seven foot they say, a strident mammoth,
a turtle-necked warrior...”
Pedersen has selected a few of Buchan’s attributes to stand for the man: “strident mammoth” is most apt if you ever saw Buchan in full gait. Pedersen ends the poem aptly, without sentiment or pretension:

“It bends wits, brooding over
what forces lobbied night sky to swallow
up the brightest star.

As to how much verve came to plunge
like a rusty anchor into fierce waters,
the mind boggles.”

Rightly, he stresses how he can nevertheless feel affinity with a craggy poet of the recent past.
Again, Pedersen allows his poetic subject to be himself, without intrusion.


This small chapbook, presumably Pedersen’s first small collection is studded with humour, acute perception, exotic scenes and detail. Its geography and poetic landscape are huge and varied, hence appealing.

Pedersen like any poet twice his age, doesn’t always get it right. Of course not. He sometimes overdoes the alliteration:
He allows “caress my own cowardly cheek” and some other instances of one alliterative word too many in a sequence. It is not a major fault and sometimes not a fault at all, just an overworked poetic device.
In “Death is a Crafty Sort” there is maybe an attempt to be too sonorous or maybe too self-conscious. Since these qualities are generally absent from the poet’s writing, it sticks out a bit in this poem but not in others. The poem still works.

I think the poet is now off to work in Cambodia but his small collection is not going to elicit one of those backhanded compliments of “promises much for the future.” Here, a young poet has already delivered. I put it to our small press scene in Scotland that this writer should be encouraged best by being published, more and often. His work is already worthy of a chunkier collection.

His poems are indeed accomplished and memorable. The poet has kept his part of the bargain. Now publishers, do yours. Let’s keep seeing his poems in print.

Meanwhile, check out Michael Pedersen on the internet or through his own Facebook.



Tom Bryan
January 2010