The Last Man With Sky

Robin Cairns

Robin Cairns is that rare beast, a stand-up poet. Having written plays for London fringe theatres, songs for bands and journalism for various obscure titles he turned to verse by chance on millenium night in Manchester Airport. He had no idea it could be so much fun. To many people Robin is a comic poet. To himself he is a poet using comedy as a way of buying time to offer his tuppenceworth to the world. Robin travels to perform across Scotland on a regular basis - at poetry nights, slams, comedy clubs, ceilidhs (lots of ceilidhs) after-dinner engagements, in schools, in libraries, rock festivals, arts festivals, what have you got? He has had work published in various places but this wee booklet is his first collection. With it you also acquire a DVD of the author performing his much-in-demand poem Old Lochgelly at Glasgow's historic Britannia Panopticon Music Hall. This is the theatre where Stan Laurel made his stage debut at the age of 16. Robin performs there in his own shows and as part of the music hall troupe who are working to restore this dark hidden gem of Glasgow's theatrical past to its former glory.

Robin Cairns is never happier than when he has an audience (or readers) laughing, as long as he knows he has something up his sleeve to squeeze a tear out of them soon.

More information and contact details on www.robincairns.com

Two poems: Good News and Beautiful and Wrong  |  Reviews

Good News

Good news, good news for modern man
Sailors defy the hornpipe ban
Panther pigment vexes Clouseau
Greek springs leak, so loses ouzo
Friday's child surprises Crusoe
Mafeking moment for Desperate Dan
Dog takes biscuit, mouse takes mickey
News flash! Life is sweet - but sticky!

Modern man good news receives
Dyslexic panda loots and sheaves
Dead man walking shops for shoes
Peas are caught for not minding queues
Bobbie McGhee has much to lose
Overdog underachieves
Garden shed in Shakattak
News flash! Gordon buys dirty mac!

For modern man the news is good
Mott The Hoople informed by dude
Bees too busy to bumble
Smoothies caught in rough and tumble
Consumer group says mustn't grumble
Screens in churches damned as rood
King tut-tuts at stolen treasures
Dracon makes defence of measures
Sailors defy the hornpipe ban
Good news, good news for modern man

Beautiful and Wrong

Naked we are beautiful
Beautiful and free
Delicious golden apple-samplers
munching from the tree

Naked we are beautiful
Would you like to dance?
We both know why we came here
in our lucky underpants
Who knows what could befall us
If we fail to keep them on
So let's just sit up drinking -
eat pakora, watch the dawn

There's beauty in our nakedness.
Did I hear someone scoff?
When you see the sort of people
who have sex it puts you off.
Was it Demi or Patrick said
they did it twice a night
I'll go and get my duffel coat.
Keep your cardie buttoned tight

Naked we are beautiful,
No photographs, no flash
The pole brings out the stripper
in a red and itchy rash
But the pervert sees perfection
as she grinds to his demands
Like she's trying to take her pants off
unassisted by her hands

Naked we are beautiful
Beautiful but cruel
So quick to crush the ardour
of the munter on the pull
Naked we are beautiful
Beautiful but cheap
A freebie to the gorgeous ones
with whom we deign to sleep
Naked we are beautiful
Alluring, charismatic,
So we keep the stupid artist's
crappy portrait in the attic

Naked we are beautiful.
Trust a guy who knows
I've got these little x-ray specs
that see right through your clothes
I got them from a comic book,
I sent in thirty pee.
Your shot in a minute, girls,
then you can see through me.
Those skin-tone tights
the naked eye so casually deceives
Like my Marks & Spencer's Y-fronts
with their pattern of fig leaves

Naked we are beautiful
On barefoot moonlit walks
My god, it's so romantic
when the bloke tales off his socks
Do you think it's accidental
Swans make heart shapes with their necks?
There's more to a relationship than
sex, sex, sex, sex, sex!

Kirsty Wark's on Newsnight
Let's take off our clobber
No, be strong, keep it on,
Don't let Paxman see your dobber
They can look out through the telly,
and they'll think you're such a pseudo
If they catch you sitting reading
Stephen Hawkins in the nude

Naked we are beautiful
Beautiful but wrong
See the beauty screaming
in the helpless fist of Kong.
The monster's massive fingers
pluck her flimsy little dress.
He loves her more and more
as she models less and less.
Atop the Empire State he climbs,
singing, "Hey! Hey! USA!
How many beastly naked apes
did beauty kill today?"

Naked we are beautiful
Beautiful and free
Grubby Cox's Pippin gobblers
munching from the tree
Boys and girls together
From temptation set to bite
The only one thing certain -
eve is overcome by night
Naked we are beautiful
Beautiful but scared
That rudely through the loveliness
our ugly souls are bared

---

I've seen and heard Robin perform his poetry on many occasions, but this is the first time I've seen them printed on the page. How do they work in print? Well, to start with, as I read them I was, of course, reminded of the performances, but it was easier to see the multiple layers in his work, the disparate threads he pulls together at readings. He's a thoughtful and well-read writer, with a wide range of subjects covered, and a huge store of anecdotes woven into the poetry. He's humorous, of course, and this comes across as well on the page as it does in performance, but there have been times - blame it on my poor hearing - when I've thought, "Did he say what I thought he said?" It's great to have the time to check, and to realise, yes, he said just that, and wasn't it funny?

The chapbook comes with a CD of Robin reading his well-known poem Old Lochgelly, which I'll come back to. In Beautiful and Wrong his repeated line is "Naked we are beautiful", and he points out the differences between the external body, which may or may not be beautiful, and the internal, where "our ugly souls are bared." Some poems - Space Age, Sundays, The Fifth Dimension - deal with growing up. I assume that they're autobiographical, but poets are tricksy folk - it's sometimes fun to lie about your childhood, or at least to exaggerate. And surely exaggeration is part of the art of any poet, not to mention being at the heart of many good jokes?

Firegazing starts from the fact that in 1912 Adolf Hitler, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were living within a few streets of each other in Vienna. I didn't know that, but Robin brings out imagined connections between the psychiatrist, the artists and the future demagogue which make a bizarre kind of sense. This is clever poetry, with an irregular and intriguing rhyme scheme, and a rhythm which starts and fits.

Like many others growing up and being educated in the middle passages of the departed century, I fell foul of the vicious and sadistic teachers who enjoyed belting pupils. It affected me deeply, as it affected many others. I hated the injustice of it, the cruelty of it, the sheer physical pain of it, but it happened to me, and I can't deny that. I won't name the school involved, nor the teachers who perpetrated the outrages, but Robin names and describes his Old Lochgelly. It's a vivid and powerful poem, deservedly well-known, and I admire Robin's ability to forgive at the end, when he encounters an aged and decrepit Lochgelly on a bus.

"Standing room only so I gave him my seat
It didn't do me any harm."

I identify too with the baggage handler Beppe Bagaglio. The one and only time I've had luggage damaged was at Naples airport.

Rags of Glory and How went the century for you? feature quieter, more reflective voices, but these reflections pop up in many of the other poems. He's a complex individual, and a complete original. If you've heard him, you'll know that, and if you haven't heard him yet, this is an ideal introduction to the force of nature that is Robin Cairns.

And I love the cover photo of Robin with his bucket-lid satellite dish, a reflection of the title poem.

Colin Will, Poetry Scotland

Some of you may have seen the Glasgow based performance poet and comic Robin Cairns perform live. Cairns' first pamphlet is built largely around his material developed for his live act (indeed there is an accompanying DVD of him performing Old Lochgelly at Glasgow's Panopticon Music Hall) - so the question must be: how well does his material translate to the page?

Well pretty well, mostly. Cairns does colloquial Scots-English free verse in most of the poems that will also be pretty accessible south of the border, as well as presenting himself as an often bemused commentator on the modern world.

He is a Scotsman abroad in many of the poems, for example The Africans:

Under the guns of the Guardia Civil
the immigrants keep their bravura
I'm eating ice-cream.
They row sixty miles, trying to make Fuerteventura...

Not content with solely being the tourist, Cairns offers comment on his Scots upbringing:

They told me in terrible detail
how corporal punishment felt.
In Scotland the wrongdoer's hands
Were thrashed with a cloven leather belt.

Old Lochgelly

This poem invites comparisons with the Robert Garioch poem Elegy and, whilst in Garioch's poem there is an unsympathetic attitude to the former headmaster, Cairns' poem has a form of reconciliation:

I saw Lochgelly on the bus last week.
His real name's Mister Grange.
He's old and stooped and diminished.
He had trouble counting his change
For two whole days after one of his beltings
I lost the use of my arm...
Standing room only so I gave him my seat,
It didn't do me any harm.

Indeed this poem betrays the 'performance aspect' of much of Cairns' work, watching him perform this on the DVD it is apparent that Cairns as a poet works much better in the live format. His personality is warm and engaging and he adopts the different roles with relish. The poems work on the page, but are better seen and heard performed and so I suggest he tries to ensure that the book/DVD format is followed for future publications.

These comic vignettes are contrasted with more serious poems with a broader historical and cultural context, for example in Firegazing the epigram reads:

1912: Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Adolph Hitler are living within a few streets of each other in Vienna.

This is probably my favourite poem in the pamphlet, beginning and ending with Sigmund Freud gazing into the fire whilst Cairns ponders about the futures of the others: Adolph Hitler takes a walk, folds his uniform and warms himself by the fire; Klimt 'parades a crush'; whilst Schiele 'shows his balls' from his mother's bedroom. Their futures will take their course and Freud ends the poem by throwing some notes into the fire, prefiguring the book-burning and destruction to come.

The common root of these characters is their shared time and place; their destinies however, are different. Cairns allows us to make up out own minds about our own destiny, our own space and time.

Upon reading it is apparent the poems fall into roughly two categories, some are the comic Scots vignettes which 'ground' Cairns as a Scottish writer referencing his upbringing - whilst others are more serious in which the Scotsman encounters and responds to the world today.

Cairns likes to play these off against each other, and does so in some of the poems, for example: Ti Amo In TT Il Lingue Del Mondo Cairns takes a line graffitied on the seat of a bus, empathises with the writer and wonders about love:

And articulacy lends itself to travel
But seldom in the back seat of a bus
No, our vandal's lyric effort
bears the hallmark of the humdrum
In the language of the world, he's one of us

So, is The Last Man with Sky worth buying? I think so: the DVD shows Cairns at his best, on stage, however there is enough within these poems to justify re-reading and exploring the depths within them, It is worth remembering that experienced and capable a performer aside, this is Cairns' first pamphlet and I am sure he will develop future work with the page as much in mind as the stage, I look forward to reading and seeing it.

Type

---