E-Book
18,19 €

New Collected Poems E-Book

Iain Crichton Smith

0,0

18,19 €

oder

Leseprobe lesen

Sammeln Sie Punkte in unserem Gutscheinprogramm und kaufen Sie E-Books und Hörbücher mit bis zu 100% Rabatt.

Mehr erfahren.

Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

Iain Crichton Smith's Collected Poems was awarded the Saltire Prize when it was published in 1992. This completely revised and enlarged edition includes seventy additional poems, mostly from the four books the poet published in the 1990s: Ends and Beginnings (1994), The Human Face (1996), The Leaf and The Marble (1998) and A Country for Old Men and My Canadian Uncle (2000), together with extracts from his 1971 translation of Sorley Maclean's epic D?in do Eimhir agus D?in Eile (Poems to Eimhir, 1943), a founding moment of modern Gaelic poetry. The new introduction by Matthew McGuire of the Department of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow, illuminates the range of Crichton Smith's achievement as a poet of Scotland and Europe: rooted in local tradition yet, in Edwin Morgan's words, 'open to the whole intellectual world'.

Details

Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:

EPUB

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Bewertungen

0,0

Rezensionen(0 Rezensionen)

Leseprobe

Iain Crichton Smith

New Collected Poems

Edited by Matthew McGuire

To Donalda

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The poems in this volume are taken from the following publications: The Long River (Edinburgh: Macdonalds); The White Noon (from New Poems, edited by Edwin Muir, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode); Thistles and Roses (London: London: Eyre and Spottiswoode); Deer on the High Hills (Edinburgh: Giles Gordon); The Law and the Grace (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode); Three Regional Voices (London: Poet and Printer); From Bourgeois Land (London: Victor Gollancz); Ben Dorain (Preston: Akros Publications, reprinted Newcastle upon Tyne: Northern House); Lines Review (special edition of the author’s work, Edinburgh: Macdonalds); Poems to Eimhir (London: Victor Gollancz); Love Poems and Elegies (London: Victor Gollancz); Penguin Modern Poets 21 (Harmondsworth: Penguin); Orpheus and Other Poems (Preston: Akros Publications); Poems for Donalda (Belfast: Ulsterman Publications); The Permanent Island (Edinburgh: Macdonalds); The Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe and Other Poems (London: Victor Gollancz); In the Middle (London: Victor Gollancz); The Emigrants (Glasgow: University of Glasgow); The Exiles (Manchester: Carcanet); A Life (Manchester: Carcanet); The Village and Other Poems (Manchester: Carcanet); Ends and Beginnings (Manchester: Carcanet); The Human Face (Manchester: Carcanet); The Leaf and the Marble (Manchester: Carcanet); A Country for Old Men and My Canadian Uncle (Manchester: Carcanet).

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Iain Crichton Smith was a prolific writer. During his career he produced twenty-seven volumes of poetry, fourteen novels, twelve short story collections and a number of plays for both radio and stage. Friend and fellow poet Norman MacCaig once joked that he was worried about Iain: ‘He hasn’t published a new book for… days.’ Such creative abundance presents obvious challenges to the editor of Crichton Smith’s work. The present volume is a fully revised and updated version of Carcanet’s original Collected Poems (1992) which was both a Poetry Book Society Special Recommendation and a winner of the Saltire Prize. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Crichton Smith continued to write and publish throughout the 1990s, producing four additional volumes of poetry: Ends and Beginnings (1994), The Human Face (1996), The Leaf and The Marble (1998) and A Country for Old Men and My Canadian Uncle (2000). This new edition contains seventy additional poems, the majority of which are taken from these four volumes and, for the first time, extracts from Crichton Smith’s 1971 translation of Sorley MacLean’s epic Dàin do Eimhir agus Dàin Eile (1943), or Poems to Eimhir, often regarded as the founding moment of modern Gaelic poetry. The importance of this sequence, along with the sheer quality of Crichton Smith’s translation, more than merits its inclusion. The New Collected Poems also reinstates the date and title of individual collections within the body of the text, enabling the reader to contextualise particular poems whilst listening out for the inflection of particular volumes. Of course, the preoccupations of Crichton Smith’s work transcend both the volumes and periods in which they initially appeared. The current collection allows Crichton Smith’s themes to emerge, including his preoccupation with island life, Calvinist religion, the role of art and the nature of exile. To this end I have included a number of poems omitted from the original 1992 Collected Poems: ‘Moonlight over the island’, ‘The place without music’, ‘The Island’, ‘Poem for Auden’, ‘My Uncle’, ‘Clouds’, ‘The Survivors’ and ‘To hell with this poetry reading’. This New Collected Poemsrepresents the most complete and comprehensive collection of Iain Crichton Smith’s poetry to date.

* * *

Born in Glasgow in 1928, Iain Crichton Smith moved with his family to the Hebridean island of Lewis when he was two years old. His father, a sailor, died of tuberculosis when Iain was one and his family was raised by their mother in Bayble, a small village on the island’s east coast. Like the rest of this generation, Crichton Smith experienced a bilingual upbringing on Lewis. Whereas Gaelic was the language of home, it was English that was the language of school: as a result, Crichton Smith’s formal education was in the medium of a foreign tongue. These circumstances, the experience of living and moving between two cultures, had a profound effect on the kind of poetry he would subsequently write. If English opened up vast new worlds of experience, such gains were not without their cost. The Gaelic poet Derick Thomson, who grew up in the same village as Crichton Smith, wrote:

The heart tied to a tethering post…

And the mind free.

I bought its freedom dearly.

In 1945, at the age of seventeen, Crichton Smith left Lewis for the first time and travelled to Aberdeen for university and an honours degree in English Literature. This was followed by two years’ National Service, before he began work as an English teacher, first in Clydebank (1952–5) and then in Oban (1955–77). In 1977 Crichton Smith retired from teaching and devoted his energies to writing full time. In the same year he married Donalda Logan. Having received an OBE in 1980, the poet moved with Donalda to the village of Taynuilt in Argyll. He lived here from 1982 until his death in 1998.

The people, places and events of childhood left indelible marks on Iain Crichton Smith and his vision of the world. The poet admitted that as a boy he had little feeling for Scotland as a country, except perhaps through football, and felt intuitively that he belonged to Lewis. Such assertions interrupt the nationalist assumptions that often underpin the appreciation of modern Scottish poetry and can be seen in recent anthologies such as Dream State: The New Scottish Poets (1994) and Scotlands: Poets and the Nation (2004). The nature of island life, its separation from the mainland, creates a distance, both physical and emotional, between Crichton Smith and the preoccupations of Scottish nationalism. Islands, of course, figure prominently in the work of other twentieth-century Scottish poets, most notably Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown. However, unlike Muir and Orkney, Crichton Smith’s Lewis did not represent some form of cherished territory, a mythic space that must be sought out and recovered. In an essay entitled ‘Real People in a Real Place’ (Towards the Human, 1986), the poet writes:

To grow up on an island is to grow up in a special world. Many of the books that I have read on the Hebrides, however, make this world appear Edenic and unreal: others suggest that the islander is a child who appears lost in the ‘real world’, and even invent for him a language that was never spoken by anyone. It is easy to assign the islander to this misty, rather beautiful world, and leave him there.

It is this mystical otherworldliness that Crichton Smith’s poetry continually attempts to unravel. At the same time he is highly alert to the sacred, otherworldly quality of everyday experience. For the literary critic George Watson the urge ‘to connect the parish to the universe’ is one of the most enduring notes within Crichton Smith’s poetry.

Lewis, then, as both inspiration and obstacle, sanctuary and prison. One aspect of island life that was particularly important in this regard was the influence of the Free Presbyterian Church. Edwin Muir had argued that the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century signalled a moment of acute despair for Scottish culture. If this was the case, then the Free Presbyterian Church was arguably the most distilled form of such constrictive energies. Indelibly stained by original sin, mankind lived in a world of ubiquitous temptation. Music and dancing were sinful indulgences; storytelling a kind of vanity. A dour practicality eclipsed the pleasures of a rich imaginative life. In early poems such as ‘The Dedicated Spirits’, ‘Highland Sunday’ and ‘Love Songs of a Puritan’ Crichton Smith confronts the repressive nature of this culture. And in ‘Poem of Lewis’ he depicts an island where:

They have no place for the fine graces

of poetry. The great forgiving spirit of the word

fanning its rainbow wing, like a shot bird

falls from the windy sky. The sea heaves

in visionless anger over the cramped graves

and the early daffodil, purer than a soul,

is gathered into the terrible mouth of the gale.

On a place like Lewis, nature itself seems to conspire against such delicate flights of fancy. There is the sense of an agenda being laid out in these early poems and much of Crichton Smith’s subsequent writing attempts to escape such imaginative poverty, to articulate ‘the fine graces of poetry’, to locate ‘the great forgiving spirit of the word’ amid the carefully crafted line. Despite the rejection of Calvinism, a deeply religious rhetoric (‘grace’, ‘forgiveness’) informs Crichton Smith’s vocabulary. Such self-contradiction echoes the Yeatsian notion that poetry emerges out of the argument we have with ourselves. In ‘Real People in a Real Place’, Crichton Smith comments: ‘Religion has been internalised in my personality whether I like it or not and its dilemmas will always be with me.’ Embracing such contradictions also serves to rebuke the dogmatic certainties of the Free Presbyterian Church. Throughout his poetry Crichton Smith cultivates a Keatsian sensibility, a willingness to exist amidst uncertainty and doubt, without striving after fact or reason. Such impulses are revealed in the titles of various collections: Thistles and Roses (1961), The Law and the Grace (1965) and Ends and Beginnings (1994). Crichton Smith’s is a poetry of contestation, of contingency and conditionality: ‘Dogma teaches people to give superficial answers to very profound questions,’ he said in a 1993 interview. ‘I feel a lot of my poetry is questioning, rather than providing answers.’ As a result, Lewis cannot be embraced, yet nor can it be completely abandoned. Despite its cold conservatism it remains a community, and for Crichton Smith this is not something to be forsaken lightly:

To work harmoniously within an accepting community must be as high a pleasure as is known to man […] One of the problems of modern man is that he does not have a real home, and for the modern writer that he does not have a real audience, only individuals scattered here and there, pin-points of light answering each other from space.

Throughout Crichton Smith’s work the tensions outlined above are inextricably bound up with questions of language. The infallibility of ‘The Word’ is contrasted with the fallibility of words, their straining to capture the quiddity of human experience. The poem is not a sacrosanct object and its truth, if it contains any at all, is elliptical and elusive. Such propositions find their fullest working out in Deer on the High Hills (1962), which the poet himself regarded as his greatest work. The poem deals with the essential strangeness of the world, the chasm between objective reality and our attempts to render it through language. An extended meditation on a single scene, Deer on the High Hills is symptomatic of the Imagist tendency within Crichton Smith’s work. To this end, the cultural and spiritual nuances of Lewis are made manifest in one of the most recurring images in his poetry, the old woman. Eight poems in the New Collected Poems refer to the old woman in their title. She is also the main character in Crichton Smith’s most successful novel, Consider the Lilies (1968), a story set during the Clearances about an elderly woman confronted by eviction. The image of the old woman is rooted in the poet’s childhood, spent among the many widows and spinsters of the two world wars that scarred the first half of the twentieth century. It is also informed by his relationship with his own mother, who was herself a strict Free Presbyterian and someone the poet remembered as being generally unaffectionate. Many of the poems are attempts to achieve a level of intimacy that was absent from the poet’s Lewis childhood. In contrast to a writer like Norman MacCaig, Crichton Smith has little interest in writing about landscape, generally preferring people as subjects for his poetry. Many poems, such as ‘Encounter in a School Corridor’, ‘She Teaches Lear’ and ‘School Sports, at the Turnstiles’, draw directly on his professional life as a teacher. His working life exerts a grounding effect within his writing, rooting abstract experiences in everyday reality. A fine example of such transfiguration of the commonplace is the elegy for a fellow school teacher, ‘For Angus MacLeod’:

A useful life with pupils and with poems:

sufficient honours (his humour asked no more)

he takes his place in many minds and rooms.

Without their knowing it, his patient care

instructs far hands to turn a new lever,

a voice to speak in a mild-mannered tone.

The deeds we do reverberate forever.

Inveterate justice weighs the flesh and bone.

His best editions are some men and women

who scrutinise each action like a word.

The truest work is learning to be human

definitive texts the poorest can afford.

And whilst Crichton Smith does write out of his own local experience, he is not a parochial poet, a Highlander merely writing about Highland life. His poetry evinces a voracious literary appetite; it forms an imaginative constellation whose stars include Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, and George Orwell. For Edwin Morgan this is the triumphant note of Crichton Smith’s creative life, illustrating ‘how someone brought up in a narrow, constricted environment can be open to the whole intellectual world if he wants to be’. It reveals an author committed to the universe in its entirety, to what the Irish poet Louis MacNeice called ‘the drunkenness of things being various’.

* * *

Although most of his work is in English, Gaelic was of crucial importance to Iain Crichton Smith. Several of the volumes that make up the New Collected Poems are translations of work by other Gaelic poets, including Ben Dorain from the eighteenth-century poet Duncan Ban Macintyre and The Birlinn from the Gaelic of Alexander Macdonald. Also featured are poems from The Permanent Island and The Emigrants, translations by the poet of his own Gaelic originals. As mentioned earlier, the New Collected Poems also contains part of the translation of Sorley MacLean’s 1943 epic Dàin do Eimhir agus Dàin Eile, or Poems to Eimhir. There is a nice synchronicity here, as the young Crichton Smith was given a copy of this book as a school prize when he was a fifth year pupil at the Nicholson Institute in Stornoway. Influenced by the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Communism and the work of W.B. Yeats, MacLean’s sequence marked a radical turning point in the evolution of modern Gaelic verse, signalling a decisive shift away from the oral tradition of Gaelic poetry and its familiar styles, metrics and themes.

The twentieth century was, of course, a period of considerable turbulence within Gaelic-speaking areas. It witnessed a relatively isolated, monoglot culture increasingly penetrated by the forces of modernity. In 1901 a census recorded over 200,000 Gaelic speakers living in Scotland; by 2001 that number had fallen to less than 60,000. In ‘Real People in a Real Place’, Crichton Smith writes: ‘We are born inside a language and see everything from within its parameters: it is not we who make language, it is language that makes us […] For Gaelic to die would be for the islands to die a more profound death than economics could bring.’ Poems such as ‘Shall Gaelic Die?’ explore the implications of linguistic death:

He who loses his language loses his world. The Highlander

who loses his language loses his world.

The space ship that goes astray among planets loses the world.

The conflation of Gaelic and galactic imagery emphasises the scale of such a loss. It also alludes to the technological roots of such narratives. Radio, television and the computer have all had dramatic implications for the feasibility of Gaelic as a living language and in poems such as ‘Speeding Up’ and ‘By the Sea’ the poet casts a cold eye over the advances of the electronic age. This being said, Crichton Smith was never a naive dreamer, patiently waiting the heroic rehabilitation of some mythical Gaelic order. His writing is highly alert to the clichés of Gaeldom; in poems like ‘The Gaelic Proverb’ he takes to task the pithy phrasemaking of inherited wisdom. Elsewhere, in poems like ‘Eight Songs for a New Ceilidh’, it is a fully integrated, modern Gaelic culture that Crichton Smith attempts to imaginatively invoke. Most of his poetry was written in English, and the poet admitted that such a choice often felt like an act of betrayal. However, we might read such preference in light of Crichton Smith’s extended introduction to the craft, both at school and university, through English-language verse. This bitter-sweet pill is one that almost all Gaelic writers had to swallow during the course of the twentieth century. If bilingualism entailed partial estrangement from one culture, though, it also opened the doors to a whole new literary universe. Like Sorley MacLean before him, Crichton Smith reaches far beyond the oral traditions of the Gaelic-speaking regions of Scotland. His early school reading was in Shelley, Kipling and D.H. Lawrence. Later, the two poets he would come to regard as the most exciting and significant influences on his work were an Englishman, W.H. Auden, and an American, the confessional poet Robert Lowell. In fact, Crichton Smith would write his own version of Lowell’s groundbreaking collection Life Studies (1959) in 1986, under the title A Life. His work echoes that of his contemporary, the Glasgow poet Edwin Morgan, in terms of its willingness to transcend any discernibly local or national tradition.

If other poetry in English was crucial to Crichton Smith’s vision, there are two other important influences, which might be termed the classical and the intellectual. In A Life the poet describes leaving Lewis for Aberdeen for the first time, clutching ‘my Homer steady in my hand’. Throughout the New Collected Poems both The Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid offer lenses through which Crichton Smith views life in the Highlands, not least its acute experience of exile. In ‘Real People in a Real Place’ he writes: ‘The fact of the islands stronger than any other is that of exile: it is that which casts its guilt continually backwards like the rays of a setting sun. The islander has never had the chance of staying where he is: history has condemned him to departure, and afterwards to the choice of whether or not to return.’ Homer and Virgil allow the poet to recontextualise such formative experiences within the Gaelic-speaking world. In A Life he quotes the Headmaster of Oban High School, who was also a classical scholar:

‘Transposing Greek to Gaelic is no toil.

They had their clans, their sea terms. And the style

of the great Odyssey is what Gaelic knows.’

Ancient poetry enables Crichton Smith to retain a quiet poise, to locate the modern Gaelic experience as part of a deeper, more universal set of historical narratives. The use of Homer simultaneously evokes a writer like James Joyce, for whom the ambivalent nature of home also offered a well of creativity from which great art might be drawn. In poems like ‘No Return’ however, Crichton Smith realises that not all stories of estrangement are fulfilled by a mythic homecoming: ‘you can’t go back to / that island any more. The people / are growing more and more unlike you’. At the same time, poems such as ‘The Departing Island’ suggest the persistence of a spiritual umbilical cord, a connection that remains and can never be completely severed:

It’s the island that goes away, not we who leave it.

Like an unbearable thought it sinks beyond

assiduous reasoning light and wringing hands,

or, as a flower roots deep into the ground,

it works its darkness into the gay winds

that blow about us in a later spirit.

In terms of an intellectual or philosophical context, Crichton Smith is equally cosmopolitan, drawing upon European traditions of existential thought. A scepticism of religious dogma becomes a suspicion of all abstract systems. Like the existentialist philosopher, Crichton Smith prefers subjective experience as the foundation stone for determining human behaviour. In ‘The White Air of March’ he writes:

I speak now of those who told the truth.

Let them be praised.

Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard,

Kafka – let them be honoured.

Out of all these thinkers it was the Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard who most influenced Crichton Smith’s poetry, particularly through his belief in individual authenticity and the importance of self-reflection and introspection as a means of its attainment. The working out and exploration of such tensions pervade this New Collected Poems and their enduring relevance of such questions in the twenty-first century is merely one of many reasons why Iain Crichton Smith’s poetry will continue to fascinate.

Finally, mention must be made of Crichton Smith’s wife Donalda. The poet’s friend Alasdair MacRae describes his marriage to Donalda as the making of Iain Crichton Smith. She domesticated and humanised him, ‘encouraged him and opened up areas of life new to him, [and] taught him much about trust and love’. Some of the most exquisite touches within Crichton Smith’s work occur when the poet turns his gaze on the most rewarding aspect of his life. In 1974 he published the collection Poems for Donalda. The New Collected Poems also contains The Leaf and the Marble (1998), a sequence inspired by a trip to Rome, where the monuments of the faded empire, for all their grandiosity, are eclipsed by the perennial rejuvenations of love.

When everything trembles, only love holds it together.

Rome is an act of the will, but the leaf protects us.

Day after day, year after year, Rome with its stony walls and

statues is

built above a cage of wolves.

But love is not an act of the will.

No legions can defend or destroy love.

When the walls fly apart, when the horizons shimmer, only

love can save us.

It is only fitting that this New Collected Poems, like so many of Crichton Smith’s previous publications, is dedicated to Donalda.

SELECTED FURTHER READING

Novels

Consider the Lilies (London: Gollancz, 1968)

The Last Summer (London: Gollancz, 1969)

My Last Duchess (London: Gollancz, 1971)

Goodbye, Mr. Dixon (London: Gollancz, 1974)

The Village (Inverness: Club Leabhar 1976)

An End to Autumn (London: Gollancz, 1978)

On the Island (London: Gollancz, 1979)

A Field Full of Folk (London: Gollancz, 1982)

The Search (London: Gollancz, 1983)

The Tenement (London: Gollancz, 1985)

In the Middle of the Wood (London: Gollancz, 1987)

The Dream (London: MacMillan, 1990)

An Honourable Death (London: MacMillan, 1992)

Listen to the Voice (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993)

Short Fiction

The Red Door: The Complete English Stories 1949–76, ed. Kevin MacNeil (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001)

The Black Halo: The Complete English Stories 1977–98, ed. Kevin MacNeil (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001)

Murdo: The Life and Works, ed. Stewart Conn (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001)

Play

Visitor, in Ricardo Galgani, Linda McLean and Iain Crichton Smith, Family: Three Plays (London: NHB, 1999)

Literary Criticism

Towards the Human: Selected Essays (Edinburgh: Macdonald Publishers, 1986)

Introduction to Sangschaw and Penny Wheep: Lyric Poems by HughMacDiarmid. Spoken word CD compiled to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Hugh MacDiarmid (Glasgow: Scotsoun, 1992, 2002)

Critical Works on Iain Crichton Smith

John Blackburn, The Poetry of Iain Crichton Smith (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1992)

Gerry Cambridge, ‘Interview: Iain Crichton Smith at Seventy’, The Dark Horse 6, Spring 1998, pp. 46–55

Douglas Gifford, ‘Deer on the High Hills: The Poetry of Iain Crichton Smith’, in Gaelic and Scots in Harmony (Proceedings of the Second International Conference on the Languages of Scotland, University of Glasgow, 1988), ed. Derick S. Thomson (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1990)

Carol Gow, The Mirror and the Marble: The Poetry of Iain Crichton Smith (Edinburgh: Saltire Society, 1992)

Colin Nicholson (ed.), Iain Crichton Smith: Critical Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992) Poem, Purpose and Place (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992)

Alasdair D.F. MacRae, ‘Remembering Iain Crichton Smith’, The Dark Horse 8, Autumn 1999, pp. 52–8

Edwin Morgan, ‘The Contribution of Iain Crichton Smith’, Scotlit 23, 2001, www.arts.gla.ac.uk/scotlit/asls/ICSmith.xhtml

Isobel Murray (ed.), Scottish Writers Talking, 2: Iain Banks, Bernard MacLaverty, Naomi Mitchison, Iain Crichton Smith, Alan Spence (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002)

Stan Smith, Poetry and Displacement (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007)

Moray J. Watson, ‘Iain Crichton Smith’s Perception’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2001)

Christopher Whyte, Modern Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004)

Grant F. Wilson, A Bibliography of Iain Crichton Smith

NEW COLLECTED POEMS

fromTHE LONG RIVER (1955)

(1955)

The Dedicated Spirits

The dedicated spirits grow

in winters of pervasive snow

their crocus armour.

Their perpendiculars of light

flash sheerly through the polar night

with missionary fire.

The red and sombre sun surveys

the footsteps of the ancestors

in the white ghostly snow:

from pasts without a season they

inhabit the imperfect day

our grieving spirits know.

About us the horizon bends

its orphan images, and winds

howl from the vacant north.

The mapless navigator goes

in search of the unscented rose

he grows in his heart’s south.

Turning on the icy wheel

of image without substance, heal

us whatever spirit lies

in polar lightning. Let the ice

break, lest our paralysis

destroy our seeing eyes.

The faceless night holds dialogue

with us by the ancient rock.

The demons we abhor

dwell in the waste of mirrors we

choose to protect us from the fury

of the destructive fire.

O chosen spirits turning now

to your large skies the sun from snow

has swept at last,

let music from your rising wings

be heard in islands where we sing

to placate a lost ghost.

‘Some days were running legs’

Some days were running legs and joy

and old men telling tomorrow would be

a fine day surely: for sky was red

at setting of sun between the hills.

Some nights were parting at the gates

with day’s companions: and dew falling

on heads clear of ambition except light

returning and throwing stones at sticks.

Some days were rain flooding forever the green

pasture: and horses turning to the wind

bare smooth backs. The toothed rocks rising

sharp and grey out of the ancient sea.

Some nights were shawling mirrors lest the lightning

strike with the eel’s speed out of the storm.

Black the roman rocks came from the left squawking

and the evening flowed back around their wings.

Poem of Lewis

Here they have no time for the fine graces

of poetry, unless it freely grows

in deep compulsion, like water in the well,

woven into the texture of the soil

in a strong pattern. They have no rhymes

to tailor the material of thought

and snap the thread quickly on the tooth.

One would have thought that this black north

was used to lightning, crossing the sky like fish

swift in their element. One would have thought

the barren rock would give a value to

the bursting flower. The two extremes,

mourning and gaiety, meet like north and south

in the one breast, milked by knuckled time,

till dryness spreads across each ageing bone.

They have no place for the fine graces

of poetry. The great forgiving spirit of the word

fanning its rainbow wing, like a shot bird

falls from the windy sky. The sea heaves

in visionless anger over the cramped graves

and the early daffodil, purer than a soul,

is gathered into the terrible mouth of the gale.

Anchored Yachts on a Stormy Day

Nine yachts are rocking in the sullen water,

one mast to each, one mast narrow and straight,

almost (so one would think) about to break

but never breaking quite. Indeed a kind of laughter

a demon gaiety, lightens their dull weight

so that the wave and wood, moving together,

blend into one as if they yearned to make

a unity in spite of love or hate

and the dense rancour of the heaving weather.

Though a tenth lies there capsized, the others dance

their stormy demon dance as if awake

they know the chances they must always take

when seas are riding high: and that their tether

is what will save them when the waters shake.

fromTHE WHITE NOON(1959)

(1959)

False Summer Leans

False summer leans across the dwindling veins:

the crags are wild with flowers and dear indeed

the sails, green-leaved, that dizzy the blue waves:

and pleasant that boat’s engine, gravely humming

like Sunday pots on boil. The winter’s pains

hang out like ragged washing, whitely streaming.

These are fine mornings when the boats at anchor

ride, freshly-painted, on the winking waves

and seagulls, yellow beaked, sidle down piers.

The herring surge into the wide Atlantic

and those, who come with flowers to growing graves,

are caught, like bees, within them, lost to tears.

Such music stirs within the naked rocks.

Such waves remember where the dear heads range

studying water in a purer tide

that ageing mouths gulp up the air like hawks:

for now, indeed, time is no longer strange

but walks beside us calmly, groom and bride.

And this is much that, from the dizzied cliffs,

descending late, we reach the level land

where growth as free as this can take our place.

This is a season we have never planned

but meets us gravely, face to equal face,

content to die, nor seek to understand.

In Luss Churchyard

Light strikes the stone bible like a gong:

blank leaves gape open. Greenness of grass is most

what, raging round the slabs, astonishes

the casual visitor drifting like a ghost

among the inscriptions and the wishes

chiselled on stone, prayed for a dead tongue.

A bird flickers from bough to windless bough

unsettled, frenzied perhaps with heat

or violence of the breast, a pagan joy.

The stranger remarks anew his moving feet

so constantly labouring in his employ

and walking without thought as they do now:

and the very inscriptions mirror modes of death –

the early stately and the later terse

(the very early almost invisible).

Consider how this eighteenth-century verse

glides with a quiet charm through pastoral

landscapes of the wandering breath.

Here however a skull, there crossed bones

leap out with tigerish instancy, like fire

burning through paper: with a savage force

punch through electric noon where the hands perspire

and prickle with the sun. This is indeed a coarse

imagery to be carved on harmless stones.

The adjacent river rambles quietly on

with wayward music, hardly disturbing even

the image of a leaf or stone or stick

but holding all the amplitude of heaven –

the fiery blueness of a composed Atlantic –

arching an earth poised in the breathless noon

where living and dead turn on the one hinge

of a noon intensely white, intensely clear.

The eyes read dates: the hands steady and rest

on leaning stone without a twitch of fear

merely an aimless curiosity. The breast,

empty with indifference, broods in change.

Yet, should a charge populous, terrible,

burst through the feeding greenness, capsizing this

mound like a knotted table, knees would sink

into the imponderable abyss

where the one star burns with a convulsive wink

in a white sky, blown outwards like a bubble.

The silence holds. A saw nags at a tree.

The settled bird chirps briefly while a breeze

ruffles its breast. The eye confused by dates

is pleasurably excited by the trees

arching a coolness over the heavy gates.

Therefore out of the noon’s implacable sea

of hammered light the feet, still steady, go.

The hands touch wood and push the gate away

from the dreaming body which casts a little shade.

Out of the hectic greenness into a day

of dusty roadways the feet, suddenly gripping, wade

gathering power, changing to swift from slow.

Highland Sunday

Striped-trousered, hard-black-hatted, sunday-sunned,

swayed to clasped hands they stand at the church door

the graced, unwasted flock: and small, half-stunned

by the bells’ summering welcome, I implore

a sudden lightning out of thunderous sound.

The Sunday palms with gentleness the roar

of ghostly waves that swell this cold-railed ground.

A band of bounded black defines the shore.

The threshold glitters to the whinnying souls

hand-clasped from anguish.

Has this circle’s core

its purple darkness?

In assembling heat

the pouring roses drown their glowing shoes

and riotous gods, flexing warm muscles, fuse

their summer ardours with a loved defeat.

End of the Season on a Stormy Day – Oban

In the dead park a bench sprawls drunkenly.

Buoys bob in the bay.

The ghostly waters rise in laddered spray.

Blank-faced hotels stand stiffly by the shore

in the dead silence after crockery falls.

Their sighing landscapes sink into the walls,

the visitors being gone, the season ended.

Boats lag on the waves untenanted.

There’s thinner patter of walking on the winded

grey extended front. The soldier draws

into his Great War stone from loose applause.

A motor boat, stern-flagged, drives steadily through

the seething waters. Braced to a splayed poise

a yellow sailor digs his cockerel claws.

And so! And so! His harvest in his hold

he weathers another season, drives through cold

towards his roped stone quay, his dead fish fold.

School Teacher

She was always earlier than the bell at nine.

She trod the same stone street for forty years.

(The stone might show a broken-backed design

of prints that slowly slant from toe to heel

as the years told.) Boys saluted well

as, morning-mounted, light struck spinning wheels

of cycles heading schoolward. Poets’ lines

shimmered within boys’ cheering. Globes and faces

spun, blurred. Open atlases

shouted their naked countries, bright as paint

created for her pupils. (‘Stand. Recite.’)

And who stood up? John’s father? John? The faint

graph of her will climbed the wavering wall.

It climbed for forty years. It made a white

snake on distemper. (‘Who was the famous saint

who crossed from Ireland in a flimsy boat,

Columba or Columbus? Surely you remember?’

‘Remember, answering questions you must quote.

Never forget what the poet really wrote.’)

The iambic’s broken by the clanging bell.

The room’s destroyed by noise, by leaving feet.

What was the message she had tried to tell

for forty years? She knew she had a debt

to pay for living. It had started well.

Yes, there was something she had tried to tell.

She’d never told it, for the moment passed

into the seething waters as a cast

wavers in underwater, taking shape

from shaken river movement, from the swell.

Yes, there was something. But she could not tell.

The walls wavered into moving lines.

John? John’s father? stood in a bright class

hurrying the dead metres of his race

well-brushed, well-mannered. Irony perhaps?

Was that the message – that we’ll never learn?

That all our atlases have shining maps?

The classroom wavered. The four walls poured in.

Her barren gown hung in the sea’s spin.

‘I want that apple. Bring it here at once.’

And smilingly he came to lay it flat

on the clear desk. It hissed like a red cat:

and standing quietly by her unlearnèd breast

the boy’s eyes shone with an oblique unrest.

Sighing, she locked the lid. The apple lay

in her loved desk, soon to decay.

The Widow

That’s his harem on the shelves.

I don’t know

whether to keep them or to ask some men

to take and marry them. Would that be wrong,

a posthumous divorce? No, I think no,

they shall bed here: at least they’ll have a roof

even though he’s gone without a single proof

of late repentance. But ‘he had a stroke’ –

how could he show repentance? Being aloof

was always his best nature. I had proof.

Surely if anyone knows I ought to know.

Let me be clear – his chair is rocking now

as if he’s sitting in it writing scripts

for his societies – (Lamb it was he liked

of all the writers – he had wounded wings).

He should have told me forty years ago.

The church echoed my wifehood. There is no

happiness like that, the golden rings

growing to children’s curls. And then the snarl,

barren and savage, on our wedding night.

The light burned late, the bare electric light

mocked my new body. You’re an ageing girl.

The two rooms shook loudly in the night.

It wasn’t right. No, though you’re sitting there

it wasn’t right, I tell you. You were tired

or so you told me when you came from where

you taught your pupils. They at least were fired

by passions that your bookishness could share

only by proxy. You would make them write

their growing into grammar (‘would’ to ‘might’).

And then you were a child again. The stroke

twitched your left eye. I towered you lying white

each gaping morning. What it was that broke

was mended out of pity by the night.

I did not love you. I did what I would do

for any sufferer. You had gone beyond

the limits of the landscape that I knew.

I’ll not be jealous of books. I can’t afford

to let this anger shake me. The white sword

rusts in the bookcase. It’s a thousand years

since I first met you. ‘Clever lad’ they said

‘and diligent as well, but, more than these

a faithful son, his mother’s tireless nurse.’

O, it’s what I knew. Your bedroom’s polished board

shakes with your pacing. It was you, not me,

whose anguish throbbed the house when like a tree

you felt your birds all leave you, without a word

hunched at your glittering window. What went free

that should have stayed? Your heart clicked like a glove.

Perhaps you loved me as you loved those boys

and girls you taught, leading to stricter joys

their halting minds? Perhaps it was a love

the spirit not the flesh might understand.

Why did you marry me? (I long to know.)

I hear you saying: ‘They must learn to love

the purest light shed from the purest mind’

as, raincoated and thin, you’d strike through wind

into the endless struggle to be true

to what is most untrue, the being-bound

to loveless loving. Should I read your books

not leave them in the glass case where I found

them, neatly ordered? You can write each night

here on this table. I will rub it white.

How could you forgive me if you could

never forgive yourself? That’s why you’re dead.

‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ I might have said

but that’s untrue. You know it is untrue.

Could you expect from me a gratitude

I could not feel? Often in the night

I heard you tossing like a guilty child

calling his mother through the shaken wood.

You wouldn’t marry till she died. I knew

or thought I knew that that was true and right.

Can I forgive you or be reconciled

when you would scourge yourself? It’s past my knowing.

Are there such people whose true life is dying?

O, if there are, you certainly were one

Whose best success was failure.

To cease growing –

that is the worst of all. Therefore must I

hug your cold shoulders all the wintry night

and summer too? Old woman like a sky

open to rain and lightning. Am I God

so to forgive you or to leave the Why

nailed to my cross? Your chair is rocking, rocking,

as if with grief. I see you with a rod

whipping your bony body. Stop, I say.

Stop, child, you mustn’t. You were all I had.

Statement by a Responsible Spinster

It was my own kindness brought me here

to an eventless room, bare of ornament.

This is the threshold charity carried me over.

I live here slowly in a permanent

but clement weather. It will do for ever.

A barren bulb creates my firmament.

A sister cries: ‘I might have learned to wear

sardonic jewellery and the lineament

of a fine beauty, fateful and austere.

I might have trained my perilous armament

on the learnèd and ferocious. A lover

would have emerged uniquely from that element.’

I know that for a lie, product of fever.

This is my beginning. Justice meant

that a man or woman who succumbs to fear

should not be married to good merriment.

I inspect justice through a queer air.

Indeed he lacks significant ornament.

Nevertheless he does not laugh or suffer

though, like pity’s cruelty, he too is permanent.

And since I was trapped by pity and the clever

duplicities of age, my last emolument

returns, thus late, its flat incurious stare

on my ambiguous love, my only monument.

Night Walk 1

Someone had painted a moon on the sky.

He had added chimney smoke and painted houses.

It was really the sort of night you could get for Christmas

if nights were given for gifts or if you could buy

the earth as its own painting. The roads were painted

a hollow repetitive yellow as if all the way

from station to cottage a great yellow dog had panted

its yellowness up the long road by the side of the bay.

The dog would be part of the painting, not a live dog

and its breath would also be painted. Similes flog

the huge real brutes out of their slavering day.

Whoever had painted that night had knocked corners off.

You could hardly imagine you could bear to live in a world

thus painted and flattened. You’d have to be painted yourself

that is to say

you’d have to be less than human or inhuman enough

not to get up in the night to drive that nightmare away.

Night Walk 2

The tall lamps burn their sockets late

like ambitious men who cannot sleep at night

for thinking of a crown or of a slight

endured in inward fury.

I walk this street

also in fury (though I don’t know what

or whom to train it on). Only the light,

a sickly yellow, gathers round my feet

till they are yellow too, an incomplete

tinkle of hollow bells, neutral, not sweet.

This is the sound I make – of echoing wells

tapped by my yellow feet, as tired and late

they ring on the street’s door their yellow bells.

It is this yellowness that wakes my fury

though to be furious with a colour is

matter for laughter, and one should be chary

of such an almost-madness, like the lilies

furiously spinning in a flat air.

Therefore, though I seem to swim in bare

and sickly yellowness, I must curb this rage

for rage is yellow too and makes a cage

of slovenly light around a parrot’s stare.

Seagulls

These have the true cold avarice beyond

anything we can say of them or write down.

Their hunger

as they plunge

in a squabble of devils on to a ringed pond

of paper, orange peel, and all the trash

we throw down water to them (their small cash)

attracts nobility through their obscene

beggary by singleness of will

that, screeching here, like selfish children, they

demand from us to be responsible

for the gifts of food they ask, screaming their way

through panes of meaning that, invisible,

make rocks in twisting air: and their beaks are

like children’s fingers scrabbling on a pane

caging the gift they think their right. It’s there –

therefore it’s theirs, invented for their own.

These have the true cold avarice beyond

anything of spirit you could suppose.

They are like

the ragged quick

nervous fears that make dim islands round

the circle of our gayest happiest thoughts

or like our sins that follow us in hordes

of running angular screams back to the house

we poorly guiltily inhabit. These

are screeched despairs that on our tallest mast,

beside our yellow ropes, perch high and curse

all that was best in climbing, all the most

impeccable and sated intercourse

that our illuminated beings had:

and strike with swearing voices through the bold

webs of analysis that good or bad

hang out their azure meanings on our field.

There is nothing anyone can do with these

sheer naked wills that dominate this sea.

Nearer to stone

than to a thinking man

they have no cruel look or kind. Amuse

yourself with fantasies, these will not come

out of the different air which is their home.

Your circles cannot touch. No tangent may

even lightly curve through blue to join you to

a seagull’s world which at the centre is

the single-headed seagull in the blue

image you make for it, its avarice

its only passion that is really true.

You cannot admire it even. It is simply

a force that, like a bomb slim as a death,

plunges, itself, no other, through the ample

imperial images that disguise your truth.

Room for Living

You should stop here and not step

into that land of strange waters and strange

persuasive drum beats which have power to change

skin and skeleton to an earlier shape

till, like a mumbling cannibal, you set up

your own headstone on a dazzled slope.

These sights trouble your dreams. Like a toothed moon

rearing from rank forest lands you go

in silver aseptic light over the slow

entangled swamps and, as in a bright spoon,

see huge queer shapes dancing: a slant grin

splitting a face as dangerous as a lion.

Nevertheless, if you wish to keep

yourself to yourself and not become

a sort of music beaten on a drum

in a kind of shapelessness and dying sleep

you should stay quietly by this river, not rig ship

to take you down far water, bright and sharp.

If you listen calmly, you can hear music here

of rusted broken strings, an orchestra

that gathers volume like an autumn star

filling your sky with light, stranger more dear

than any light through any atmosphere

of foreign land, nourished by native fear.

A kind of courage glitters in that huge

corrupted music and heroic men

win crippled victories on a staring plain.

If you listen tranquilly you will enlarge

yourself to more than you till the white surge

will bear you also down its stream of courage.

Beautiful Shadow

Beautiful shadow, cool, fastidious,

that follows substance like a wife or child,

you push the world a stage away from us

and you are all that from the huge and wild

riotous abandon of the exodus

of colour and of shape remain for us.

I do not think you the ridiculous

follower or yesman of the old

lying phenomena that the eyes unfold:

but rather shy and quiet and moving here

in your cool tracks like a soft-stepping deer

and in your inner darkness burning all

false decoration from the actual.

Therefore remain with me, fine shadow, for

you are the ending of a metaphor

and all aesthetics gather round you till,

thus loving you, I find you at the end,

beyond the anguish of the ethical,

my best follower and my truest friend.

For the Unknown Seamen of the 1939–45War Buried in Iona Churchyard

One would like to be able to write something for them

not for the sake of the writing but because

a man should be named in dying as well as living,

in drowning as well as on death-bed, and because

the brain being brain must try to establish laws.

Yet these events are not amenable

to any discipline that we can impose

and are not in the end even imaginable.

What happened was simply this, bad luck for those

who have lain here twelve years in a changing pose.

These things happen and there’s no explaining,

and to call them ‘chosen’ might abuse a word.

It is better also not to assume a mourning,

moaning stance. These may have well concurred

in whatever suddenly struck them through the absurd

or maybe meaningful. One simply doesn’t

know enough, or understand what came

out of the altering weather in a fashioned

descriptive phrase that was common to each name

or may have surrounded each like a dear frame.

Best not to make much of it and leave these seamen

in the equally altering acre they now have

inherited from strangers though yet human.

They fell from sea to earth from grave to grave

and, griefless now, taught others how to grieve.

The Window

We walked that night between the piled houses.

It was late and cold. Frost gleamed on the road

like the sheen of over-learning. Beaked and bowed,

the lamp-posts lectured light, dispensed discourses.

All windows were dark. As on the edge of a cliff

we warily walked, stepping on steeps of silence

except for the click-click-click of our heels, the parlance

of stones that down a well make a crooked graph.

A bus like a late planet turned a corner.

There was nothing else, we and darkness merely.

These ancient houses had never stood in an early

atmosphere or radiance of summer.

At day’s end they sank heavily into slumber

as a man sleeps open-mouthed at his fire when

too much light and heat exhaust his brain.

He floats on darkness like a tired swimmer.

None but we two, walking almost as over

a world’s end. Yellow light sang and sang

into our coats, our faces, skin and tongue.

We thought each other shook with a yellow fever.

Then she said: ‘Look, there’s a light up there’

and, slowly climbing the cliff-face, my eyes came

to a square light that shone with a blunt flame.

It was solid and dull and red in the yellow air.

And I wondered whose it was – a sleepless man

turning and turning between a window and bed

cursing his sleeplessness and the huge dread

shrill light that pecked at his bemused brain?

Or was it perhaps one studious and grave

who, grasping his pale book, would listen to

the sound it made, the authentic echo

of words returning what he thought and gave?

Or was it a mother, waking for her child,

who could not sleep because of the cold air,

and stumbled between dull bed and dull chair

in the red light imperious and wild?

At least the light was human: and we looked

into each other’s eyes shyly as if

a house had suddenly sprung from a dead cliff

and it was all our searching spirits lacked.

Tausende von E-Books und Hörbücher

Ihre Zahl wächst ständig und Sie haben eine Fixpreisgarantie.

Sie haben über uns geschrieben:

E-Book

New Collected Poems E-Book

Iain Crichton Smith

Ähnliche

New Collected Poems

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

SELECTED FURTHER READING

Novels

Short Fiction

Play

Literary Criticism

Critical Works on Iain Crichton Smith

NEW COLLECTED POEMS

fromTHE LONG RIVER (1955)

The Dedicated Spirits

‘Some days were running legs’

Poem of Lewis

Anchored Yachts on a Stormy Day

fromTHE WHITE NOON(1959)

False Summer Leans

In Luss Churchyard

Highland Sunday

End of the Season on a Stormy Day – Oban

School Teacher

The Widow

Statement by a Responsible Spinster

Night Walk 1

Night Walk 2

Seagulls

Room for Living

Beautiful Shadow

For the Unknown Seamen of the 1939–45War Buried in Iona Churchyard

The Window