From Orasaigh by Steve Ely
I
From the midsummer height of Càireasbhal,
looking west over causewayed Dùn na Cille,
the sun has lit the townlands in the Gulf Stream’s evening zephyr.
In the pellucid ocean light, under the troposphere’s
argentine blue, everything comes into HD focus:
the blackland’s dikes and rickety fences,
rush-fledged forage of tussock and rock,
fleece-shedding sheep and rough, red-pelted shorthorns;
Boisdale’s straggle of crofts and cottages,
Nissen huts, tractors, jacked-up transits;
and the tracks beyond through the plain of barley,
to the sugar-sand crescent of Orasaigh Bagh.
Orasaigh, the double-humped tidal island
on the beach off the edge of the Boisdale machair,
still moored to her mother by the sand umbilicus
she fashions herself from the silts of the longshore drift.
She rises on her strand like a sagging frame tent,
or the sunken withers of a sea-ware pony;
two shaggy rorquals, breaking the swell
from the Sound of Barra, frozen on the curve
towards Hirte and the Greenland seas.
The beach-stripping blitzkrieg of winter storms
and the rising tides of the gnawing Atlantic
have frayed, but not in centuries severed,
her squat tombolo’s hawser. She will not let go
of the land that birthed her and to which she still belongs.
words by Joseph Blythe
The poet Steve Ely has, for quite some time now, been working on various projects that bring the landscape of the natural world to life. From 2018’s Zi-Zi Taah Taah Taah (Wild West Press) to 2023’s Lives of British Shrews (Broken Sleep Books) and then 2024’s Eely (Longbarrow Press), his work has presented, reimagined, and even mythologised the lives of animals such as the willow tit, the British shrew and the European Eel. In 2024’s Orasaigh he turned his attention to landscape, specifically that of the titular tidal island of South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides. A tidal island is a piece of land that is accessible at low tide, but inaccessible at high tide when the causeways are submerged by the ocean.
Perhaps I should explain my connection with Ely here, both to contextualise my exploration of his poems and to clarify my interactions with him. Ely was one of the first critical eyes on my poetry and has assisted in the crafting of a lot of my fiction. We’ve been in touch since 2019 (lucky him!) and I had the pleasure of arranging an event at Revolution in Huddersfield for both Orasaigh and the anthology Apocalyptic Landscape (Valley Press, 2024), which he edited.
By Ely’s own admission at the above launch event, Orasaigh came about through procrastination – he sat down to write about something else, but found himself drawn to this little tidal island. The poem and its accompanying photography by Michael Faint covers 65 pages and sees him writing ‘extendedly and sustainedly’ about the landscape, just as he asked attendants at his Writing the Apocalyptic Landscape five-seminar creative writing course to do.
Orasaigh employs an expressionist visionary subjectivity that, during his research, Ely has ascribed to some of the works of Ted Hughes. It was also a style of writing he encouraged submitters to employ for the open call of the anthology Apocalyptic Landscape, a call-out I unsuccessfully submitted to (though the poem I wrote has since been overhauled and has become something quite inspired by Ely’s Orasaigh and the wider traits of expressionism). In Apocalyptic Landscape, Ely defines his understanding of Expressionism as:
an approach to creativity characterised by a rejection of objectivity in representation in favour of a visionary subjectivity that draws on inner life and imagination to transform and distort content, deploying artifice, abstraction, typologies, metaphors and symbols to create novel forms and shape presentations in a tendentious manner
This notion of the ‘novel forms’ symptomatic of expressionism is apparent throughout his book-length poem Orasaigh, though our Poem of the Month is specifically section I of the book’s first part. Though Ely sees the first part as more realist and representational, with expressionism in mind I was immediately drawn to the image of a “straggle of crofts and cottages” and the “sugar-sand crescent of Orasaigh Bagh”. These are not instances of glaring expressionist complexity, but they suggest the idea of taking a photograph and tilting it a few degrees, to perceive simply at a different angle. The Gaelic ‘Bagh’, meaning bay, adds to this.
For me, the expressionist rendering of Orasaigh takes hold the hardest, calling on those internal perceptions of the surrounding world, as he describes the isle of Orasaigh as:
still moored to her mother by the sand umbilicus
she fashions herself from the silts of the longshore drift.
Ely is not anthropomorphising Orasaigh here, nor should this be perceived as simple personification. Instead, we are invited to imagine the silt causeway connecting Orasaigh as an umbilical cord created by the mother, even though logic dictates that it is in fact the ‘longshore drift’, the back and forth of the sea, that crafts and shapes the causeway. Despite the notion of the ‘umbilicus’ being inherently familiar to readers (all of whom, I expect, are human), Ely defamiliarises here. The island and its mother are commander over the sea, using its tide to shape their own existence and connection.
The island is also an extension of its mother. It is treated here as a separate entity, which it becomes at high tide. However, in Ely’s own words and the sustained metaphor of a mother and child:
She will not let go
of the land that birthed her and to which she still belongs.
The island is hence presented as strangely limited in its own existence – despite the ‘gnawing Atlantic’ yearning, almost like a lover, to sever Orasaigh from its parent, the ocean has failed and the island remains connected to the mainland.
Notice how you and I, in our respective writing and reading, have become steeped in the notion of this island as a child to the mainland? Such is the power of expressionism: to present the familiar in an unfamiliar, unique, and individual way. Could I have perceived the causeway between wider Uist and Orasaigh as an ‘umbilicus’? Could you have? Or would I have seen it as a lead around the neck of a dog that is allowed to run free at certain times? Or would you have presented instead the power of the tide to sever, for a time, Orasaigh from its mother, as Hades severs Persephone from Demeter for half of the year?
Expressionism favours personal perception, and in Orasaigh, Ely brings to life his own vision of this South Uist tidal island and the climate that shapes it. He renders it in the very characteristics he has taught me to include in my own poetry: concrete setting, vivid image, and a clear structure.
So enjoy our poem of the month, part I of Steve Ely’s Orasaigh. The book itself, available via Broken Sleep Books, contains 28 pages of poetry alongside 45 black and white photographs from Michael Faint, who lives on the Isle of South Uist and renders beautifully the wider image of the isle of Orasaigh, as well as the nuances of the island vividly expressed in Ely’s poem.
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Joseph Blythe is from Yorkshire. He has short stories and poems present or forthcoming from Stand, Pennine Platform, Ink, Sweat and Tears (winning Pick of the Month), London Grip, Angel Exhaust, Allegro Poetry and more. He writes, edits and teaches, and is currently working on a novel about the fallibility of memory. He holds an undergraduate degree in English Literature with Creative Writing and a Master's in Creative Writing. He tweets, Instagrams, and Blueskys @wooperark.