Cold Night Lullaby

by Colin Mackay

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 87
Rating:

Synopsis:

No publisher summary found, so I'll have a go: Cold Night Lullaby is a volume of poems written by Colin Mackay, a Scottish poet who took aid to Bosnia during the war, and saw horrific things there. Cold Night Lullaby is his account, in poems, of that experience.

Cold Night Lullaby is Colin Mackay’s working-through of the things he saw and experienced in Bosnia: the deaths of other people who were there, like him, to provide aid; the death they saw all around them; the violence; the corpses.

And the death of the Serbian woman he fell in love with, Svetlana, along with her two children. He said goodbye to them in the morning, drove away in the afternoon to arrange taking them with him to Britain, and drove back to find them dead, killed by other Serbs as traitors. Graphic details: View Spoiler »Ludmilla, Svetlana’s daughter, was shot dead; her son was never found. Svetlana herself was raped and mutilated, with a knife thrust into her vagina and left there, at the end. « Hide Spoiler

Colin Mackay found them and saw all of this, and he was never alright again — couldn’t, in fact, imagine a world in which he would be alright. The whole collection is a haunting, his ghosts and trauma, and — in the wake of his suicide in 2003 — of Colin Mackay himself. It’s hard to evaluate the technical merit of the poems against how raw the emotion is. I think the emotion is a good part of what gives them heft, and the blunt horror of some of the things he saw, most particularly surrounding the death of Svetlana. If you’re easily shocked by graphic language and violence, I’d avoid this one.

It’s a powerful volume which I know about because of Karine Polwart’s song, Waterlily. I recommend the song as well, though it’s less graphic by a very long way.

This was a reread for me, and it hasn’t lost any of its punch.

Rating: 5/5