Leonard, Tom
LEONARD, Tom
Nationality: Scottish. Born: Glasgow, Lanarkshire, 22 August 1944. Education: St. Monica's Primary School and Lourdes Secondary School, Glasgow; Glasgow University, M.A. in English and Scottish literature. Family: Married in 1971; two children. Career: Has worked in a variety of mainly clerical jobs; organized, with Joan Hughson, sound-poetry festivals Sound and Syntax, 1978, and Poetsound '84, both in Glasgow. Writer-in-residence, Renfrew District Libraries, 1986–1989; Glasgow University and Strathclyde University, 1991; Bell College of Technology, Hamilton, 1993–94. Awards: Scottish Arts Council bursary, 1971, 1974, 1978; Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year award for Intimate Voices, 1984; Arts Council Autumn Book award for Places of the Mind, 1993. Address: 56 Eldon Street, Glasgow G3 6NJ, Scotland.
Publications
Poetry
Six Glasgow Poems. Glasgow, Midnight Press, 1969.
A Priest Came On at Merkland Street. Glasgow, Midnight Press, 1970.
Poems. Dublin, E. and T. O'Brien, 1973.
Bunnit Husslin. Glasgow, Third Eye Centre, 1975.
Three Glasgow Writers, with Alex Hamilton and James Kelman. Glasgow, Molendinar Press, 1976.
My Name Is Tom. London, Good Elf, 1978.
Ghostie Men. Newcastle upon Tyne, Galloping Dog Press, 1980.
Intimate Voices: Writing 1965–83. Newcastle upon Tyne, Galloping Dog Press, 1984.
Situations Theoretical and Contemporary. Newcastle upon Tyne. Galloping Dog Press. 1986.
Reports from the Present: Selected Poetry and Prose 1982–1994. London, Jonathan Cape, 1995.
Etruscan Reader 5, with Tom Raworth and Bill Griffiths. Devon, Etruscan, 1997.
Plays
If Only Bunty Was Here (radio play). Glasgow, Print Studio Press, 1979.
Tickly Mince (revue), with Liz Lochhead and Alasdair Gray (produced Glasgow, 1982).
The Pie of Damocles (revue), with others (produced Glasgow, 1983).
A Bunch of Fives, with Liz Lochhead and Sean Hardie (produced Glasgow, 1983).
Other
Satires and Profanities (miscellany). Glasgow, STUC, 1984.
Two Members' Monologues. N.p., Edward Polin Press, 1989.
On the Mass Bombing of Iraq and Kuwait, Commonly Known as"The Gulf War." Stirling, AK Press, 1991.
Places of the Mind: The Life and Work of James Thomson ("B.V."). London, Jonathan Cape, 1993.
Editor, Radical Renfrew: Poetry in the West of Scotland from the French Revolution to the First World War. Edinburgh, Polygon, 1990.
*Critical Studies: "A Scots Quartette," in Eboracum (York), winter 1973, and "The Sea, the Desert, the City: Environment and Language in W.S. Graham, Hamish Henderson, and Tom Leonard," in Yearbook of English Studies (London), 17, 1987, both by Edwin Morgan; "Tom Leonard: Man with Two Heads" by Tom McGrath, in Akros (Preston, Lancashire), April 1974; "Noo Lissnty Mi Toknty Yi" by George Rosie, in Radio Times (Scottish edition), 12–18 February 1977; Tom Leonard, Glasgow, National Book League, 1978; Poéstie, Sonore Internationale by Henri Chopin, Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 1979; "Poetry for the People in Glasgow Patois" by Alasdair Gray, in Glasgow Herald, 17 March 1984; "Poetry in Glasgow Dialect" by Stephen Mulrine, in Focus on Scotland, edited by Manfred Gorlach, Amsterdam, Benjamins, 1985; "Scots, Poets, and the City" by Barry Wood, in The History of Scottish Literature, IV: Twentieth Century, edited by Cairns Craig, Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1987; "Urbanity in an Urban Dialect: The Poetry of Tom Leonard" by Ronald K.S. Macaulay, in Studies in Scottish Literature (Columbia, South Carolina), 23, 1988; "One Human Being Speaking to Another: Tom Leonard's Glasgow Poetry" by Valerie Shepherd, in her Language Variety and the Art of the Everyday, n.p., Pinter, 1990; "Ma Language Is Disgraceful: Tom Leonard's Glasgow Dialect Poems" by Colin Milton, in Englishes around the World, I: General Studies, British Isles, North America, edited by Edgar W. Schneider, Amsterdam, Benjamins, 1997.
* * *Tom Leonard is one of the most interesting of the Scottish poets who emerged during the 1960s. His reputation in Scotland has tended to center on his poems in the Glasgow dialect, but in fact, as the publication of his first general collection, Six Glasgow Poems, made clear, he is a man of many styles, a restless, formal experimenter whose language is laid with surprises, traps, and ironies. There is a considerable element of humor, sometimes fantastic and sometimes moderately black, to attract the reader, and a recurring deadpan strangeness is characteristic. Some of the ironical effects are slight, jokey, throwaway. But in the best poems, as with "simile please /say cheese," the interlock of images and ideas forces the humor to work in unusual and meaningful ways. The Glasgow poems make use of local idiom and pronunciation for a range of effects, from the bold outspoken back talk of schoolgirls skipping their bus fares ("A Scream") to the more sophisticated meshing of religion and football in "The Good Thief." These poems take the risk of being obscure to English readers, although the book provides a translation for the sake of offering a tribute to the much attacked Glasgow environment, not that the tribute is anything but unsentimental.
Language, religion, sex, and politics continue to be explored in Bunnit Husslin and Ghostie Men in poems of great precision and compression, though sometimes with an outspokenness alarming to educational authorities, and Intimate Voices offers a useful collection and survey of his work from 1965 to 1983. The "voice" of the title is crucial, not only in the sense that Leonard's accurate ear allows him to make use of monologues, dialogues, parodies, casual remarks, and language games with a minimum of overlay or working up or pretension but also since it helps to suggest his growing interest in performance and in the dramatic or the semidramatic. The dramatic monologue, applied particularly to political subjects—and his political commitment, always there, has become more prominent—is developed in the slashing prose pieces of Satires and Profanities, a centenary tribute to James (B.V.) Thomson's book of the same title, and in Two Members' Monologues. The latter also contains his "A Handy Form for Artists," in which readers are invited to state their reasons for not taking part in Glasgow's so-called City of Culture events of 1990. In poetry his independence of mind slices through a range of modern cant in Situations Theoretical and Contemporary. Leonard is an instantly communicative poet whose work, including its "bad language," about which there will always be diverse views, nevertheless repays close attention on the printed page.
—Edwin Morgan