Poems in Matthew Rettino’s debut chapbook Pilgrimages (Cactus Press, 2025) explore many Scotlands, the ones of yesterday and today, both the real and the fantastical. From historic milestones to seers and landlords; bog bodies, burial rites, and Neolithic sites, no stone is left unturned on this rich and scenic journey which also considers the various forms of displacement faced by a people, whether it be physical, social, linguistic, or all of the above.
The pilgrimage begins with a titular poem, visiting the past and the appearance of runes from the Anglo-Saxon futhark: “A man ᛗ crossed on the Marloch.” From there, a family’s history, skillfully entwined with an undercurrent of folklore, emerges. Themes such as the “second sight” (a believed ability to predict the future), wars and skirmishes, and the Highland Clearances are all touched upon; however, not all questions can be answered on this search for identity. In “Thomas Babington Macaulay”, a display of possible legacy is revealed and then followed by a found piece: “Macaulay’s “Minute on Education”: A Blackout Poem” where a certain irony takes hold on reflections about the English language, “with a Minute that lasted two hundred years.”
In “Kinning Park” Rettino’s wistfulness for an unknown Glasgow “though [it] live[s] on in my parents’ photo album” renders the collection impressive in its tonal range, as the poem “Landlords” also gives a glimpse of humour:
After his flagbearers died,
Sigurd Jarl seized the raven
and fell in battle himself.
Whose landlord ever did that?
Craftwise, the language and structure of the poems are controlled with clarity, precision, and word economy, painting picturesque tercets with the element of setting, both urban and rural, as the focal point, populating the pages with marram and heather; tenements and causeways; isles, lochs, and cairns. In the penultimate poem, “Art Therapy”, “a copper plate relief stained / from thirty years in an attic” melds with other sensory cues to capture the spirit of Scotland from the perspective of a Scottish-Canadian poet:
in the boiling broth of barley and lamb,
in the slàinte of whiskey,
in quiet nights reading alone after work.
These carry the memories that lie
out of frame.
Overall, the traditions, values, and memories of Pilgrimages—as well as intangible heirlooms, such as a love for reading passed down from one generation to the next—are sure to find an audience with those who share an interest in their family’s heritage, whether it be Scottish or another culture.
Matthew Rettino is a poet and speculative fiction writer from Montreal who gravitates towards the historical, the weird, and the fantastic. After studying modern fantasy literature for his SSHRC-funded master’s thesis at McGill University in 2016, he attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop and served as managing editor for Scrivener Creative Review. Over the years, he has interviewed poets such as George Elliott Clarke, Greg Santos, Ilona Martonfi, and Jerome Ramcharitar, as well as fantasy authors such as Joshua Philip Johnson, Claude Lalumière, and R. F. Kuang. One of his current projects consists of writing blog reviews of all 110 stories in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. His poetry has appeared in Lothlórien Poetry Journal and Lantern Magazine and is forthcoming in The Pit Periodical. His fiction has appeared in NewMyths.com and Bards and Sages Quarterly, while a new short story is forthcoming in an anthology from AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review. You can usually find Matthew in Montreal reading his poetry and prose at the Accent Open Mic. You can find out more about him at www.matthewrettino.com and follow his newsletter at buttondown.com/MatthewRettino.
Publisher: Cactus Press (September 2025)
Chapbook
Brooke Lee (she/her) is a freelance writer and editor in Montreal who writes fiction under the pen name River Lee. For more info, visit her website at riverleewriter.ca.
