UKH

Found this poem last night while browsing a book of MacCaig's works. Is this lovely or what?

Between

To think that between
those stoniest of mountains, Foinaven and
Arkle, there lies a loch
that deserves a name like –
The Loch of the Coire of the Green Waterfalls!

Today and tomorrow are
Foinaven and Arkle, are
the barest of days.
– But tonight
she will be with me whose name
outsings in my mind
all the waterfalls in Scotland.

- Norman MacCaig, January 1966

In reply to DougG:
Aye, it's a cracker. Do you know "So Many Summers"?

In reply to DougG:

he's one of my favourites!

In reply to IanMcC:

The title rings a bell. Will look it up tonight!

In reply to Tall Clare:

This one's great as well:

Moment Musical in Assynt

A mountain is a sort of music: theme
And counter theme displaced in air amongst
Their own variations.
Wagnerian Devil signed the Coigach score
And God was Mozart when he wrote Cul Mor.

You climb a trio when you climb Cul Beag.
Stac Polly – there’s a rondo in seven sharps
Neat as a trivet.
And Quinag, rallentando in the haze,
Is one long tune extending phrase by phrase.

I listen with my eyes and see through that
Mellifluous din of sharpness my masterpiece
Of masterpieces.
One sandstone chord that holds up time in space –
Sforzando Suilven on his ground bass.

(1967)

In reply to DougG:
At the start of the walk-in to Suilven from Inverkirkaig there's a cairn with his "Climbing Suilven" poem inscribed. I'm not usually keen on that sort of thing, but it seems quite appropriate there.

In reply to DougG:

I read Clachtoll at a friends funeral some years ago. I've not got it front of me just now and can't find it on a search. Anyone know if it's available online.

Slugain

In reply to Slugain Howff:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/writingscotland/writers/norman_maccaig/w...

In reply to IanMcC:
Sorry, just realised the "links" on this page don't work.

In reply to Slugain Howff:

It is now!

Doug

Clachtoll

Ships full of birds, like sailing trees,
Add to the discourse of these seas
Whose flouncing skerries wash and sigh
A distance nearer with their cry

Long islands at their cables ride
The double talk of the split tide
And a low black rock pokes out
From caves of green its dripping snout

Coils of wind lie on that silk
That’s flowered with shadows soft as milk
Where rafts of duck crinkle and toss
And plumping cormorants crisscross

Persephone walks these plains and feels
Furrows of flowers break at her heels;
And weeds that writhe on rocky shelves
And Proteus lost amid his selves.

And Icarus, see, is gannet, drowned
And tombstoned by a fountain. Round
Loops of dolphins carry their
Singing Arions through the air.

An elegant confusion pours
A whole Atlantic on these shores
Where seapods crack and pebbles cry
And sandgrains whisper, trundling by.

Or guillemots urbanely edge
With rows of bottles that stone ledge
That founders with each tide and then
Gasps itself dripping up again.

One quality of colour ties
The seafoot to the upper skies
And one decorum binds the sounds
Of crafting lands and fishing grounds

Till night lays sound and colour by,
Excepting where the skerries lie
Cold as sirens all the night,
Opening and shutting fans of white.

(December 1955)

In reply to DougG:

thanks doug and ian

slugain

In reply to Slugain Howff and DougG:
Here's the one I mentioned earlier in the thread:



So Many Summers

Beside one loch, a hind’s neat skeleton,
Beside another one, a boat pulled high and dry:
Two neat geometries drawn in the weather;
Two things already dead but still to die.

I passed them every summer, rod in hand,
Skirting the bright blue or hissing grey
And every summer saw how the bleached timbers
Gaped wider and the neat ribs fall away.

Time adds one malice to another one-
Now you’d look very close before you knew
If it’s the boat that ran, the hind went sailing.
So many summers, and I have lived them too.

In reply to IanMcC:

Yep, looked it up last night and remembered it when I saw the first couple of lines.

Fantastic, isn't it?

In reply to DougG:

on a slightly different note, his poems about his dying wife are amazing, to my mind. Utterly anguished but still very measured.

In reply to DougG:
Absolutely.

In reply to Tall Clare:

Will need to have a look for them, Clare. So far I've tended to pay more attention to his poems about landscapes.

In reply to DougG:

I got the Collected Poems as a prize at some school prizegiving or other when I was 18 - my older brother studied MacCaig as part of his English A-level and I think I became rather entranced with them then.

Wonderful stuff. I think On the Pier at Kinlochbervie is amongst my favourite poems of all time.

In reply to Tall Clare:

I bought a recent version of his works a couple of months ago. It contains a CD with MacCaig reading some of his poems too!

In reply to Tall Clare:
I was a student at Stirling Uni when MacCaig was Reader in poetry there. He used to hang around the bar in part of the student union at lunchtime, as his acolytes hung on his every word. His best aphorism (as I recall it)was: "To be a poet, you need to be able to talk whilst holding a cigarette in one hand, a glass of whisky in the other and waving neither of them about."