Ewan Lawrie (2025) The Paper Over The Cracks

You come away after reading Ewan Lawrie’s third poetry collection as if you actually know him. Multilingual. He can even write about himself in the third person. Smartass. He wrote a trilogy of books with a lead character—Moffat—and four other novels and two short-story collections. Fuck sake. Gie it a break. Worse of all, he’s got really great hair. Hunners of it. Mair than a brown bear. I’m no jealous. Honest.

The thinks I know about poetry are used as fillers to odes on the lavvy wall—with phone numbers attached.

Lydia Millet talks about ‘good grief’.  The Paper Over The Cracks is good grief. ‘Test and count and measure for measure’. A letting go of self.

‘Put Out More Flags’ has a familiar ring.

“‘We all fought together.”’

Victory streets were

Empire-lined but

It was “no dogs,

no Irish, no blacks”.

This was Ewan’s dad’s world. ‘Whale Meat again’,/as rationing stayed/another nine years. A bitter victory.’

Labour were lost and the Tory scum Party returned.

Cyclical events. ‘Broken Spectre’.  ‘Trumpelstilskin/hair unwashed/ from gold into flax/sits upon the high chair.’

Words cannot describe the language of ‘Shoah and Tell’. And in the ‘Linz Realschule Old Boys, Class on 1905’,  Ludwig (Lukki) Wittgenstein meets another boy. ‘The boy is a populist,/his pop-eyed rage, his popular rants,’ make him unthinkable, untellable, unknowable.

Worst of all. Unseen.

‘They said I did not notice him/The Things whereof I cannot speak.’

‘Somewhere’ is an uneven response to quantum theory, which, we, of course, understand fully in a multiversion way. ‘Somewhere/ there’s a planet/ where Einstein is gutting fish/Hawkin is a dustbin man/and Da Vinci’s work is pish.’

‘3 oz of Insanity’. Smartphones. ‘I pull it from my pocket/for the first time today, but at a minute past midnight, I’m an addict, you might say.’

‘But I Am Not Writing Today.’ Has that familiar feeling for a different kind of addict. One that fritters and frays and stays away.

‘I saw a magpie wink at a junk-yard mutt/before it flew away,/now that’s a story, a flying dog--/ but I’m not writing today.’

Instead of writing it down and going with the flow, we hide within ourself. Find excuses. It’s not just despots like Hitler and Trump that are running on empty. We are too. In an empty world. Full of hollow men. All talking, nobody listening and ‘rubber cheques’. (‘I put my life on Tiktok’).

Fuck sake. Enough. The Paper Over The Cracks asks you to do that Tom Waits thing ‘with a crow’s caw voice’.

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.” So do I Tom.  So do I Ewan. Read on.

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The Paper Over The Cracks by Ewan Lawrie on Amazon UK.