Poetry

The laurelude

WN Herbert

off colour

Jackie Kay

Bloodaxe, #6.95 each

OLIVER Hardy once asked Stan Laurel: ''What's a myth?'' Stan, as befits a man born on a Bloomsday, memorably replied: ''A myth is a moth's sister.''

Myths ignite both writers under review. Inspiration comes as candlelit moments by other writers and/or other cultures. In the autumn of 1798 William Wordsworth began writing The Prelude. In 1998, Dundee-born W N Herbert was appointed Writer in Residence at the Wordsworth Museum in Grassmere. Wordsworth attacked his contemporaries' negativity when faced with nature and creativity. Herbert in The Laurelude turns to Hollywood and in particular Ulverston's own ''Idiot Boy'', Stan Laurel, to allow himself to relocate contemporary ephemera within a poem.

Jackie Kay's third collection Off Colour gains cumulative par if read in conjunction with her recent award-winning first novel Trumpet (Picador, #12.99). In the latter, posthumous fury is generated when it is discovered that celebrated jazz musician Joss Moody is really Josephine. Hypocrisy is the sick heart of fame. It fosters enmity and festers as an all-pervading virus. A series of poems entitled Virus infect, punctuate, the new work. Impact the ever-questioning nature of the poet.

The Laurelude is in three sections. The long title piece is subdivided into four Books. ''You can't rewind the video of your brain/exactly though all memory appears/as interactive,'' muses Herbert in Book Four. Suddenly the scheme of things is illuminated. In 1992 he wrote a little-noted but reverentially challenging study of MacDiarmid: To Circumjack MacDiarmid. He was particularly clear-sighted about the prosaic English 1930s poem Stoney Limits. Now he is creatively responding to his own earlier plea for ''a unification of knowledge'' in an evolving Scotland. Cultures are to be assimilated between England and Scotland. The Laurel and Hardy of the Union.

The second part of the new book Othermoor contains poems in Scots and English closing with the long In Memoriam Bill Burroughs - the same wild Bill that MacDiarmid castigated during the 1972 Edinburgh Festival. The focal poem in the final section is The Mad Men of Elgin, written in wild, evocative, and inspired Doric. It is a fitting, flyting from a writer who improves with every collection.

Jackie Kay recently spoke of her interest in ''people creating an identity, the fluidity of inventing themselves''. This perspective informs the new poems. Born in Edinburgh of a white Scottish mother and black Nigerian father, she was adopted by a white Glaswegian couple who were Communists. It was assumed that the Saltire Prize-winning first collection The Adoption Papers (1991) reflected on these matters subjectively. In fact she had never met her birth mother. But the passionate urge to search roots and forge an identity has if anything gained further mature momentum in this new collection.

Off Colour is an articulate fight against apathy. A clinical yet emotional deconstruction of false pity and pieties. ''Today people tell the sick they look well/ a leper never had to suffer compliments.'' In the powerful later poem False Memory she speaks, through a fictive persona, of self-discovery: ''The dark developing night./ Now I can peel back the wet/ pages,and let her out,/ carefully. I won't damage her head.''

Revelation leads to meditative discoveries, leading, in turn, to exorcisms and explorations. Racism and prejudice are still the natural enemies but now she sees them in the context of an inherently healthy society. That she is prepared to jettison automatic reactions and regenerate her own fulfilled responses gives this book an authoritative feel. Poetry that gleams in the night.