Iain Morrison on I'm a Pretty Circler

My Vagabond Voices poetry collection assembled itself in a perhaps unusual way. Rather than requesting that I hand over a more-or-less finished manuscript, tireless editor Colin Waters asked me to submit everything I’d written over the last few years to his considered reading. I would learn the advantage of working with a colleague who held a clear-sighted overview of what I was attempting, though whether Colin regretted his approach when I sent him over 250 poems, I didn’t ask! Either way, over several months we patiently put together a list of what we felt stood up to publication.

The next advancement came when I realised that I wanted to organise the material into discrete sections. I remember that I was specifically inspired to do this by an Everyman’s Library anthology of Scottish poetry which used broad headers like ‘Personal Matters’, ‘Prayer Matters’ and ‘Philosophical Matters’ to give order to rowdily divergent poems, but I’ve enjoyed many poetry collections that employ effective subdivisions to a range of ends. The sections in I’m A Pretty Circler would come to work like widening circles moving out from the intimate first lovers circle. And I enjoyed the possibility that among the poems the movement might equally be towards as well as away from away from a centred, candid voice: a self balancing somewhere within its non-concentric spheres. I think Mark Mechan did a wonderful job of responding to this in his cover design for the book.

As we grew closer to publication, the collection slimmed down, with poems coming out in ones and twos, or in occasional bolder cuts. I had the sense that we were identifying the most successful of each of the different sorts of poems I had been writing.

Now it’s been a year since I’m a Pretty Circler was published, and during that time I’ve felt my assessment of the poems shifting. This is in part thanks to close-up and incisive readings that have been offered back to me by reviewers and friends. Some readers have been drawn to poems that surprised me: Lover each has attracted quite a lot of appreciation while the oldest poem in the book, for example. And there’s also been a process more mysterious to me, I think to do with the experience of which poems persistently resonate within changing times and contexts. I realise that I have twice now barefacedly introduced Don’cha Don’cha as a poem I’ll probably never read in public again, only to find myself continually re-drawn to it, even recently republishing it in an anthology.

I’m growing to appreciate that the poems in I’m a Pretty Circler are busying themselves about a job I hadn’t realised I wanted them to do, which is to go out and elicit responses to questions I have about how I want to be in the world. The process has been brilliantly unstopping.

I dare to trust that the book has been working connections out for its readers too. A friend told me she had made a playlist of all the songs quoted in the collection’s closing poem Contemporary Sad Dancers School, and that made me very happy.