Ron Butlin

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Biography

Ron Butlin was born in 1949 in Edinburgh, Scotland and was educated at the University of Edinburgh. He was Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh (1982 and 1985), the Midlothian region (1989-90) and the Craigmillar Literacy Trust (1997-8). He was also appointed Scottish/Canadian Exchange Writing Fellow at the University of New Brunswick (1984-5), Writing Fellow at Stirling University (1993) and Novelist in Residence at the University of St Andrews (1998-9).

His writings include poetry, libretti, plays and journalism and he is the author of four novels: The Sound of My Voice (1987, reissued 2002); Night Visits (1997); Belonging (2006); and No More Angels (2007). He was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Book Award for his first collection of stories, The Tilting Room: stories (1983), and for Ragtime in Unfamiliar Bars (1985), a collection of poetry. His book, Vivaldi and the Number 3 (2004), is a  collection of tales about great composers, written from unusual and entertaining angles.

A freelance journalist for the Sunday Herald, Ron Butlin lives in Edinburgh with his wife, the writer Regi Claire, and their dog. His latest collection of poetry is Without a Backward Glance: New and Selected poems (2005).

In 2008, he was appointed Edinburgh Makar.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Drama, Fiction, Libretto, Poetry, Short stories

Bibliography

Creatures Tamed by Cruelty: Poems in English and Scots and Translations   Edinburgh University Student Publication Board, 1979

The Exquisite Instrument: Imitations from the Chinese   Salamander, 1982

The Tilting Room: stories   Canongate, 1983

Ragtime in Unfamiliar Bars   Secker & Warburg, 1985

The Sound of My Voice   Canongate, 1987

First Lines: Writing in Midlothian   (editor)   Midlothian District Council Library Service, 1991

Histories of Desire   Bloodaxe, 1995

Shouting it Out: Stories from Contemporary Scotland   (contributor)   Hodder & Stoughton, 1995

Mauritian Voices: New Writing in English   (editor; illustrations by Krishna Luchoomun)   Flambard, 1997

Night Visits   Scottish Cultural Press, 1997

When We Jump, We Jump High! Writing by School Children from Craigmillar   (editor)   Craigmillar Literacy Trust, 1998

Nuesta Porción de Buena Suerte/Selected Poems   (Spanish-English Bilingual Edition)   Hiperion (Spain), 2002

Vivaldi and the Number 3   Serpent's Tail, 2004

Without a Backward Glance: New and Selected poems   Barzan Publishing, 2005

Belonging   Serpent's Tail, 2006

No More Angels   Serpent's Tail, 2007

Read about books by Ron Butlin at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Ron Butlin at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1983   Scottish Arts Council Book Award   The Exquisite Instrument: Imitations from the Chinese

1984   Scottish Arts Council Book Award   The Tilting Room: stories

1985   Scottish Arts Council Book Award   Ragtime in Unfamiliar Bars

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Critical Perspective

Ron Butlin’s reputation as poet, novelist and short story writer was consolidated early in his career by three books from independent Scottish publishers: Creatures Tamed by Cruelty: poems in English and Scots and Translations (1979); The Sound of my Voice (1987); and The Tilting Room: stories (1983). Butlin has been acknowledged as one of the most engaging and diversely talented writers of his generation for many years in his native Scotland. But it is only in recent years that his work has been recognized elsewhere in the UK, even though his work is known, in translation, in 10 languages.  The subtitle of Creatures Tamed by Cruelty (above) indicates broad interests. In fact his reach is even wider than this: he is today known as a dramatist, opera librettist, radio scriptwriter and sometime journalist. But it is as an equally distinguished poet, novelist and short story writer that he is best known.

First and foremost Ron Butlin is a poet. Without a Backward Glance: New and Selected Poems (2005), shows him as a poet possessing a sure and subtle rhythmic authority. His poems have at times been rather overlooked in the competitive world of contemporary verse.  But they always reward a careful reading. The poem ‘St Cloud in the Spring’ is an example:

'Of the many versions of spring this one is mine
for the present: a suddenly coloured-in garden
beneath an imperfect blue sky, where inaccurate
songbirds keep changing their tune
as they fly round the sun …
                                                     I lie and I wait
for my past to catch up – and it doesn’t. I integrate
nothing, and nothing’s omitted, and nothing’s to come.

Let’s welcome the droughts of November,
 the snowfalls in June!'

Lines which point us towards characteristics of the work: the presentation of specific sensations viewed from an unexpected angle, an inventive exploitation of the voice in the poem, and an ambition to express personal feeling in an original way. In fact, not surprisingly, that apparent simple lyric voice is made of the art that hides art. His sensibility is open to emotion and the rhythm here is a fluid vehicle at the service of the feeling. Butlin’s rhythms are individual and confident; if read aright, they quietly grasp and hold our attention for the duration of the poem. The long poem ‘Ragtime in Unfamiliar Bars’ – one of a number of poems reflecting Butlin’s love of music – is a carefully wrought examination of keyboard playing and is also, incidentally, a metaphor for the rhythms and insights of Butlin’s own work:

                      ‘To modulate:
all keys and accidentals should relate
in your imagination before you play,
so take your time.’

Butlin’s poems have a natural humanity and celebrate our given world. He belongs with a generation of independent spirits in poetry; individual and inventive, teaching us to read poetry afresh in their lines. He has variously been called a surrealist, imagist, erotic poet; tags which, on close examination, merely prove that he cannot be easily classified. ‘The Colour of My Mother’s Eyes’ might appear surrealist, yet in fact the poem is far stranger and more memorable than any tag can imply:

'So do not ask me the colour of my mother’s eyes:
for nowadays all I know for certain is
that while the exiled Charlemagne walks to and fro,
his courtiers amuse themselves with electricity,
making the dead jerk and the living scream
with laughter.'

The ability of Butlin’s poems to hold our attention is a quality we find equally in his prose; although it is noticeable that his fiction is generally darker in both tone and subject. His short stories, first collected in The Tilting Room (1983), have a pared-down quality and a tone of voice which, disconcertingly, captivate the reader and lead us into strange and memorable corners of existence as in ‘Scenes from an Opera’ which begins:

'There is a flight of stairs leading up to the next floor. I live under these stairs. I crouch to cook and lie full-length to sleep. I have been living here for two years. I bother nobody and nobody bothers me – some of the friendlier residents even bid me good-day as they pass. One morning I found a mop and pail beside me when I woke-up.'
 
An opening which cannot be ignored. Many of these stories are 10 pages long or even shorter, yet they contain multitudes. A further book, No More Angels, was published in 2007 and is equally varied and, by turns, challenging and consoling.

Butlin’s first novel, however, The Sound of My Voice (1987), is clearly his most influential prose book and has been important to many of the present generation of brilliantly talented Scottish novelists. The book has been acknowledged by writers as diverse as Alan Warner, Ian Rankin and, most memorably, by Irvine Welsh who has called it ‘One of the greatest pieces of fiction to come out of Britain in the ‘80s’. The story leads us through the days of an alcoholic businessman suffering a nervous breakdown. The narrative pushes forward at a pace as desperate as the state of mind of this man ‘thirty-four years old and already two thirds destroyed’ as he attempts to hold back an apparently ever rising muddy tide of depression and anxiety with doses of brandy. The novel is short and told as if from the inside while keeping the reader at a distance from the unnamed protagonist by the device of addressing him as 'You' almost throughout. The book portrays a sense of a waking nightmare in which the unreflective victim is cut off from any self-awareness or hope of freedom from a relentless daily pattern of office and home life and drunken evasions. But the bleakness of the subject is told with a verve and liveliness which belies the subject and gives real pleasure.

Butlin’s love of music is found most clearly in the prose vignettes of Vivaldi and the Number 3 (2004); a book which contains an almost unclassifiable selection of short prose pieces. Butlin takes the lives of composers and philosophers and creates short fantasies around them and their work. The titles indicate something of the flavor: ‘Vivaldi, the jumping cardinal, God and the number 3’; or ‘How Bach won the battle against modern technology’.

If anything, Butlin’s prose is better known today than his poems, which is perhaps the inevitable fate of a multi-faceted talent in a world which is happier to designate writers to one area of literature only. But his poems will always find readers who care for the primacy of the imagination in defining our humanity:

'All histories are histories of desire, they tell me
how my life begins and ends: a stretch of water,
a stone a child sends skimming
to the other side.'

Jonathan Barker, 2010

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Serpent's Tail 3a Exmouth House Pine Street, Exmouth Market London  EC1R 0JH England Tel: +44 (0)20 7841 6320 E-mail: info@serpentstail.com http://www.serpentstail.com

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