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 Some of you may have seen the Glasgow based performance poet and comic Robin Cairns perform live. This pamphlet by Red Squirrel Press – okay, to get a moan out of the way, can they please include an index in their future publications?

Let’s start again. Cairns’s first pamphlet is built largely around material developed for his live act (indeed there is an accompanying DVD of him performing ‘Old Lochgelly’ at Glasgow’s Panopticon Music Hall) – so the question must be: how well does his material translate onto the page?

Well pretty well, mostly. Cairns adopts a colloquial Scots-English free-verse in most of the poems that will also be pretty accessible south of the border (where Red Squirrel are based), as well as presenting himself as an often bemused commentator on the modern world.

He is a Scotsman abroad in many of the poems, for example ‘The Africans’:

Under the guns of the Guardia Civil
the immigrants keep their bravura
I’m eating an ice-cream.
They row sixty miles, trying to make Fuerteventura…
- The Africans

Not content with solely being the tourist, Cairns offers comment on his Scots upbringing:

They told me in terrible detail
how corporal punishment felt.
In Scotland the wrongdoer’s hands
Were thrashed with a cloven leather belt.
- Old Lochgelly

This poem invites comparisons with the Robert Garioch poem ‘Elegy’ and, whilst in Garioch’s poem there is an unsympathetic attitude to the former headmaster, Cairn’s poem has a form of reconciliation:

I saw Lochgelly on the bus last week.
His real name’s Mister Grange.
He’s old and stooped and diminished.
He had trouble counting his change.
For two whole days after one of his beltings
I lost the use of my arm.
Standing room only so I gave him my seat.
It didn’t do me any harm.
- Old Lochgelly

Indeed this poem betrays the ‘performance aspect’ of much of Cairns work, watching him perform this on the accompanying DVD it is apparent that Cairns as a poet works much better in the live format. His personality is warm and engaging and he warm and engaging and he adopts the different roles with relish. The poems work on the page, but are better seen and heard performed and so I would suggest he tries to ensure that the book/DVD format is followed for future publications.

These comic Scots vignettes are contrasted with more serious poems with a broader historical and cultural context, for example in ‘Firegazing’ the epigram reads:

1912. Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Adolf Hitler are living within a few streets of each other in Vienna.
- Firegazing

This is probably my favourite poem in the pamphlet, beginning and ending with Sigmund Freud gazing into the fire whilst Cairns ponders about the futures of the others: Adolf Hitler takes a walk, folds his uniform and warms himself by the fire; Klimt ‘parades a crush’; whilst Schiele ‘shows his balls’ from his mothers bedroom.

Their futures will take their course and Freud ends the poem by throwing some notes into the fire, prefiguring the book-burning and destruction to come.

The common root of these characters is their shared time and place; their destinies however, are very different. Cairns allows us to make up our own minds about our own destiny, our own space and time.

Upon reading it is apparent the poems fall into roughly two categories, some are the comic Scots vignettes which ‘ground’ Cairns as a Scottish writer referencing his upbringing - whilst others are more serious pieces in which the Scotsman encounters and responds to the world today.

Cairns likes to play these off against each other, and does both in some of the poems, for example: ‘Ti Amo In TT Il Lingue Del Mondo’ Cairns takes a line graffitied on the seat of a bus, empathises with the writer and wonders about love:

And articulacy lends itself to travel
But seldom in the back seat of a bus
No, our vandal’s lyric effort
bears the hallmark of the humdrum
In the language of the world, he’s one of us.
- Ti Amo In TT Il Lingue Del Mondo

So is The Last Man with Sky worth buying? I think so; the DVD shows Cairns at his best, onstage, however there is enough within these poems to justify re-rereading and exploring the depths within them. It is worth remembering that experienced and capable performer aside this is Cairns’s first pamphlet and I am sure he will develop future work with the page as much in mind as the stage. I look forward to reading and seeing it.