Ulster-Scots is a marginal tongue in an advanced stage of decline. It is spoken by an aging and fragmented speech community who are often the subject of casual ridicule. It's a soft target and the butt of a number of old, endlessly repeated jokes. Even its existence is stridently denied. Its image is further tarnished by association with Northern Ireland’s culture wars. Its literary tradition is half-forgotten; its historical writers are inaccessible, largely unread and, with a few exceptions, neglected in critical circles and educational settings. Modern writing in Ulster-Scots is scarce and, in Ulster, audiences' literacy in Scots has been eroded over generations. 

These might not seem like promising contexts in which to release a collection of Ulster-Scots poems. But they are contexts that "Tha Jaa Banes" acknowledges and embraces. The text consists of a number of poems in Ulster-Scots set within a story. The story presents the poems as the work of a recently deceased writer. They have been found hidden in an old Lambeg drum and have been fortuitously, if rather clumsily, preserved. But they are the remnants, the rest of the body of work having been destroyed in an act of cultural vandalism. It is through this framing device that the central themes of "Tha Jaa Banes" are raised: authenticity, loss, tradition, identity.

I have no inclination to fight battles with those who insist on precise, imaginary divisions between dialect and language: debates on this subject are tedious, inconclusive and often populated by partisans whose linguistic credentials are fairly modest. For those genuinely interested however, an extensive body of scholarship and resources exist on Scots and Ulster-Scots. I'm content to circumvent slippery terminology and to allow Ulster-Scots to be what it is. That being said, the poems in the collection aren't meant to be a representation of contemporary Ulster-Scots speech. Instead they draw on vocabulary and idioms from the literary tradition and from the linguistic work of James Fenton and others. In using these resources the aim is to try the boundaries of Ulster-Scots and to demonstrate its potential. The aim is to showcase what Ulster-Scots can be if we choose fully to use its resources.

The poems themselves draw on the Scots literary tradition and the work of Ulster writers who have contributed to it. Traditional forms are revived with twists: for example, the "Habbie" stanza, the pacy six line stanza whose distinctive rhythm rolls down through centuries of Scots poetry, is used in the opening poem, “The Gellick”. In this poem, the speaker, a gellick (Ulster-Scots for earwig), becomes a cypher for the marginal and for Ulster-Scots itself. The "Chritis Kirk" verse also appears: a centuries old form used to describe folk festivities and customs by a speaker who is both active participant and ironic observer. Here it is applied to The Twelfth of July, that signature expression of Ulster Protestant folk culture. Such an energetic, boisterous and contentious occasion could have been made for the old Scots form.

The title poem, “Tha Jaa Banes” is the longest in the collection. The  speaker, who inhabits a sort of timeless Ulster-Scots dystopia, makes a mysterious, grim discovery: a hoard of human jaw bones buried in the Ulster mud. The poem is a yarn, a ghost story - influenced equally by childhood memories of tales told by my granny in broad, expressive, natural Ulster-Scots and my later reading of supernatural Scottish classics such as “Tam o’ Shanter”. Those inclined towards metaphorical readings are welcome to find one here in those disconnected, disembodied jaw bones whispering and chattering unintelligibly to us from the marginal spaces: 

But I hae mind o tha jaa banes’ crack,

Whan I hear tha whuskin trees,

An tha fisslin queelrods an gresses,

Shook by a skitterin breeze.

An in tha screich o tha watter quail,

An in tha whaup’s dour cry

An in tha soond o a squelchin sheuch,

Or a babblin burn forbye.

In tha thunnerplump plooterin on tha flowe,

Or dingin tha wundae pane

In tha kindlin bleezin, an greesauch settlin,

Or tha rasp o a spade on stane.

Their crack aye bides, aye it tholes,

Inaboot ma heid it birls,

Sae tha soond o tha jaa banes nyitterin 

Fills tha hail wide warl.

The second section of the collection shifts from the traditional Scots forms. There is a sequence of sonnets on the visionary Victorican engineer, Luke Livingston Macassey from Carrickfergus. This section also contains, perhaps, the first Ulster-Scots speaking meteorite in literary history: a monologue from the point of view of the Bovedy meteorite which scoured the skies of Ulster in the Spring of 1969. The collection concludes with a series of “translations” from Nagorno-Karabakh, another debatable land and intractable troublespot disputed by Armenia and Azerbaijan. These use this international conflict to reflect on identity, inheritance and borders. 

The unpromising contexts mentioned at the opening of this introduction, therefore, can be acknowledged, but they don't dissuade me of the legitimacy of writing in Ulster-Scots. Ulster-Scots, for me at least, is a uniquely evocative medium. It evokes a crucial, half-hidden strand of our collective, shared heritage and, when not corralled into false dichotomies, can offer a way out of the tiresome binaries that dominate political life in Northern Ireland. It evokes a third dimension underlying those binaries and hints at the possibility of further complexity. It evokes all things marginal, half-hidden, dissenting and non-standard. It evokes memories, personal, communal and ancestral. It evokes the hinterlands between the oral and the literary. It speaks to the porous, interconnected diversity of our archipelago.

Hooaniver, we maun gie tha oul leid tha last wurd. Ulster-Scotch can be haird an ill tae thole for readers no used tae it. But wha says poetry maun be aisy? Ulster-Scotch gies tha reader a quare gunk: whiles it’s like English gane cowp-carlie; whiles it’s no like ocht else ava. But we maun aye hae mind o tha Ulster-Scotch, for gin we dinnae mind it oorsels, Ah doot naebody else wull. Aye hae mind o tha Ulster-Scotch.

"Tha Jaa Banes" is available on Amazon UK.