Radiant Point: Poems from Brownsbank collates poems by Lorna J. Waite, written during or soon after her 2011 residency at Hugh MacDiarmid’s Brownsbank cottage, near Biggar. Collected by her husband, Professor Murdo Macdonald, following her untimely death in 2023 and published in September 2024, the volume offers up a compilation of love letters of sorts – to Brownsbank, to language, to influential women and writers, and to the universe and all that it contains.
Reflective, impassioned and insightful, Waite’s poems traverse earthbound and celestial terrain alike, moving from the mundane domesticity of the everyday and the local natural environment to the farthest reaches of the known and unknown cosmos. The poems are beautifully fitting tributes to a life of literary commitment, simultaneously illustrative of her appreciation for the infinitesimal and a respect for the infinite that can rightfully be deemed MacDiarmidian in its ambition and execution.
Waite summons the immediacy of this life, in which solitude is necessary and cosmic apprehension embraced, in the poems that dwell most explicitly in the close and intimate environs of Brownsbank cottage, affectionately termed the ‘Hooseum’. In ‘The Bumble Bee of Brownsbank’, the tired architecture of MacDiarmid’s cottage – ‘Moss covers the loved words, / Rising walls of dampness’ (p. 24) – is contrasted with the vibrancy of the flora and fauna that surrounds it, surveyed by the bumble bee that buzzes in from the periphery in a lively Scots – ‘Sucklin, hingin oan over flowery precipice, / Clingin an stickin tae globes’ (p. 24). The fixtures of Brownsbank’s interiors provide furniture for Waite’s creativity as much as for her daily life, as she works under the watchful stare of ‘Five portraits of self across Scottish time’ (p. 29) inside that ‘museum of love and poetry within moist walls’ (p. 29). In ‘Conscientious Objection and Cleaning’, dedicated to Valda Grieve, Waite finds value in the routine and ritual of the chores and responsibilities required for the upkeep of the cottage, as her ‘Evidence of living’ intermingles with the imprint left by the Grieves upon what she now calls her home: ‘I sense Chris in the freen o wee flowers, […] / Valda’s man, in the leather chair fae the millworkers o Langholm’ (p. 43). Here, as in ‘Venus in Her New Home’, Waite ponders the creative potentialities presented by Brownsbank’s sheer ordinariness: ‘Webs of a hidden universe may unravel / In the kitchen sink’ (p. 57).
Moreover, beyond the unmistakeable impact of her spatial surroundings upon her writing, the influence of MacDiarmid himself is implicit in Waite’s use of Scots, and the playfulness to be found in language that often juxtaposes the seriousness of her poetic considerations. This can be seen in the alliterative and assonantal wordplay of ‘Frithfrillery: The Butterfly’ and ‘Hutopia’, or in the dynamic vocabulary of landscape and movement that populates the ‘The Trees Were Dancin’ – in which ‘Rowans rollercoaster an tummel’ (p. 25) – and ‘Chummel Me Noo’.
The idea of a culturally rich, and linguistically diverse Scotland that emerges through these poems might have been inherited from MacDiarmid’s principles of national self-determination but Waite adapts this, bringing her proudly female voice and perspective to the foreground. As such, in ‘Scotland, Her Guid Self’ and ‘Women Teachers’, dues are paid to the strong and influential women who have shaped Scotland – ‘Freedom women, refusin / The restriction o gender, race an clas’ (p. 36) – and, in ‘Anima Albannach’, to the young girls who will do so in the future.
Waite’s ‘love of and enchantment with astronomy’ (p. 10), which courses throughout the collection as she brings the cosmic into contact with familiar and local contexts, is similarly, intrinsically, female. The symbolism of the lunar cycle recurs in poems including ‘Lunar Module’, ‘Moonluck’ and ‘The Measure of Woman’, whilst ‘First Woman on the Moon’, dedicated to Neil Armstrong, rewrites the narrative of the moon landing to centre upon the moon ‘her’-self. Personification of cosmic entities – here the moon, elsewhere ‘Wee Mercury’ – familiarises the foreign and expands the reach of the possible, as Waite speaks of the vastness of the universe in colloquial and local language, bringing it in close: ‘Wee Mercury, wi yer acne marks an potholes, / Craters, pits an speed, I am like ye’ (p. 59).
Waite’s poems affirm affinities across astronomical distances, bending conventions and collapsing scales between her self, her domestic and natural environments, and the universe beyond. Her literary speculations remain nestled within the security and solitude of Brownsbank cottage, however, introduced by her application for the Brownsbank residency and brought to a close by the report written in its aftermath. Writing in 2011, Waite stresses in this report the importance of securing funding for the cottage’s upkeep as an inhabitable writer’s retreat, highlighting the importance both that it ‘be occupied in order for it to be sustainable, habitable and well-maintained’ (p. 87), and that it be maintained in order to be fit for occupancy.
Fourteen years later, her message has only increased in urgency. Brownsbank cottage sits empty and in desperate need of the national funding and infrastructural support previously – and since repeatedly – called for. The legacy of the cottage as a literary home, retreat and ‘hooseum’ is at risk, and action is required. Reading Lorna Waite’s Poems from Brownsbank, in which the formative impact of the residency is undeniable in the language and vision of each and every poem, only delineates this further, the brilliance of her poetry exemplary of the creative potential that would be lost were the cottage not to be restored to an inhabitable state for future writers to dwell in, to work, and to envision the cosmos.
Bonnie broukit Brownsbank
I will keep the windaes licht
Ne’er smoor the flame o language
Lickin damp walls, this hoose
Needs the heartbeats o poets,
Maintainin yer hame in permanent grace,
No a halfway holiday hoose
Abandoned tae the winter o colonial neglect,
The writer’s hoose needs its workers,
Warmin the foundations o new thoughts.
(p. 25)
Radiant Point: Poems from Brownsbank is published by Main Point Books.
For more on MacDiarmid’s Brownsbank and what is to be done next, see the following webpage and featured articles: https://macdiarmidsbrownsbank.org.uk/events/.
