Iolaire is a hybrid telling of one of Scotland’s worse maritime disasters, a story of an island’s grief, a woman’s loss, and by the end, a new (though haunted) beginning.
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The sailor’s hat (of the initial quote, above), echoes throughout Iolaire by Karen Clavelle. The hat, washed up on the shore, becomes a haunting reminder for Is (short for the Gaelic Iseabail) that her love has gone missing in the waters off the Beasts of Holm. He was lost in the early hours of 1919 when the HMS Iolaire broke apart on the Beasts, the rocks at the approach to Stornoway. New Year’s Day was to have been the joyful homecoming of sailors to the Long Island (Lewis and Harris) at the end of WWI; instead, it is the saddest day.
The bride, Is, becomes a widow, a woman who writes letters to her missing love, letters that she bundles and puts away in a drawer. But the book-long narrative is told not only in the epistolary form, which allows readers to access the thoughts and emotions of Is, but the lyric also includes actual excerpts from newspapers, and transcripts from the navy’s inquiry, folkloric prophecies, the poet’s interjections, and poetry.
The first time we’re given a look at the poignant folklore is shortly before the disaster:
Now, at that time of year it gets dusk in the afternoon, and if you’re going to be seeing anything, that’s when you’ll be seeing it — at dusk. And that’s when he did — he saw the stag, him and his sisters. Standing in the path in front of them, it was, and it turned its head and it looked right at them, and then it was gone.
… And sure enough, the boat wrecked that very night. The sister’s husband, he was lost… (50).
Clavelle also uses her voice to interject observations and insights about the village where she lives during her research, and we readers time travel between then of the shipwreck and now. For example,
In the dream or out of it, I am absorbed in a village that boasts a school, a ceilidh house, a historical society, churches, a cemetery, and a tiny community shop, (the) Bùth, that besides offering groceries and hardware, houses the post office where Dorothy franks the mail with a date-stamp she changes daily by hand, and in the windows posts funeral announcements and community events (46).
Besides the village, Clavelle comments on the ship’s Gaelic name — iolaire sùil na grèine — sea eagle, a name in which irony brims: the boat named for the bird that foreshadowed war and disaster. Haliaeetus albicilla, its Gaelic name in the Seann-sgeulachdan (mythology): fior eun, the eagle, ‘the true bird’… (47).
Besides creative, lyrical, and factual prose, untitled poems also flow through Iolaire. One of my favourites is:
the tide bell rings
and I call for you in the heather and the thrift by An Cùl Beag
in the low tide from the caves from the
shadows of the stacks at Cala Ghearraidh
I call along the endless length of the Tràigh Mhòir.
beneath the slopes of the sand-cliffs, the scarred hills,
the tide pools; from the red seaweed I call
from black-sinewed strand where in grace in death gannets lie
feathers spread as though in flight, their eyes and bones picked clean
and burying beetles labour their days
I call from the blanket bogs, through the mists and the wind
from the shelter of the marram grass
where summer blues the forget-me-nots on the machair
where the greylag geese and hoodie crows, and
the ewes call in their own
so strong the pain of separation (98)
Iolaire is a poetic narrative weaving fictional letters, nonfiction articles, as well as documentary notes into a lyrical tale of love, agony, and grief. Cavelle uses many strategies to unravel the heartbreaking tale of the ship’s break-up on the rocks, the desperate attempts the sailor’s made to reach shore, the lingering anguish of the people from over 60 villages mourning 205 deaths (only 82 sailors survived).
This New Year’s Day (2024) marks the 105th anniversary of the sinking of HMS Iolaire. It is a good time to read Iolaire by Karen Clavelle and to remember one of the saddest moments to ever mark a military homecoming.
Available through your local bookstore or online: Iolaire by Karen Clavelle (Turnstone Press, ISBN 978-0-88801-611-9)