No Ruined Stone

Where does history end? Shara McCallum tries to answer this question in No Ruined Stone by re-evaluating a seemingly minor moment in the life of iconic Scottish poet Robert Burns. In 1786, under financial pressures, Burns made plans to migrate to Jamaica and take up a job as a “bookkeeper” on a slave plantation, but thanks to his success as a poet he never followed through. No Ruined Stone asks what might have happened to Burns’s “industry of myth” had he left for Jamaica, had his body of work been “composed in exile,” shaped by his colonialist mindset. From the ruins of this speculative what-if, McCallum employs a diction and style that is historically situated while managing to avoid caricature; the light sprinkle of Scots is used shrewdly to great effect in a sequence that brings Scotland and Jamaica together, layering the figure of the bard with that of the colonizer: “On this island, distinction / between planter and bookkeeper / wanes.” 

The second half of No Ruined Stone takes a further leap into McCallum’s fabulation by introducing the character of Isabella as one of Burns’s mixed-race granddaughters who, born into slavery, later travels to Scotland. “In the carrion of history,” Isabella, we learn, is “dismantled, reassembled, / dismantled.” Some of the poems in this section are presented in two fragmented ladder-like columns that speak to the taking apart of the houses symbolically present throughout the book. The columns also recall the double-entry format of an accounting journal, filled in with the “tectonic meeting” of space, omissions, and silences from the many continental transactions in the collection. While it asks us to consider a more complex version of Burns’s creative legacy and inheritance, and to examine our responsibility for the past, No Ruined Stone also contributes to the broader and timely discourse surrounding the history of colonialism, slavery, and abolition unfolding in Scotland.