This imaginary portrait shows some of the most famous late twentieth century Scottish poets gathered around the central figure of Hugh MacDiarmid. A favourably situated seat allowed me to have a long look at this picture and to wonder about the people, the style and the fact that they are all men. I wonder what sort of portrait would appear now? Our first female British laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, was born in Scotland and now lives in England. Perhaps we would see a very different sort of line-up clustered around the wonderful CAD.
Here's a sample of MacDiurmid's writing from one of his best known works:
HUGH MACDIARMID
1892-1978
SCOTLAND SMALL? from DIREADH I
Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite
Scotland small ?
Only as a patch of hillside may be a cliché
corner
To a fool who cries 'Nothing but heather!'
where in September
another
Sitting there and resting and gazing round
Sees not only the heather but blaeberries
With bright green leaves and leaves already
turned scarlet
Hiding ripe blue berries; and amongst the
sage-green leaves
Of the bog-myrtle the golden flowers of the
tormentil shining;
And on the small
bare places, where the little Blackface sheep
Found grazing,
milkworts blue as summer skies;
And down in
neglected peat-hags, not worked
Within living
memory, sphagnum moss in pastel shades
Of yellow, green,
and pink; sundew and butterwort
Waiting with
wide-open sticky leaves for their tiny winged prey;
And nodding
harebells vying in their colour
With the blue
butterflies that poise themselves delicately upon
them;
And stunted rowans
with harsh dry leaves of glorious colour.
'Nothing but
heather!' -
How marvellously
descriptive!
And incomplete!
But the name that excites me the most from my reading so far is that of Norman MacCaig. (He's the tall, skinny one on the left of the picture.) I came across one of his poems, Stars and Planets, some time ago and have read it many times with great pleasure. I won't breach copyright by quoting it in full but I'd like to. Here is the first verse:
Norman
MacCaig (1910-1996)
Stars
and Planets
Trees are cages for them: water holds
its breath
To balance them without smudging on its delicate meniscus.
Children watch them playing in their heavenly playground;
Men use them to lug ships across oceans, through firths.
To balance them without smudging on its delicate meniscus.
Children watch them playing in their heavenly playground;
Men use them to lug ships across oceans, through firths.
There are some wonderful stories about MacCaig - famously he claimed that, for him, the time needed to write a poem was: "Two fags. Unless it's a wee one, then it's one fag." Who could fail to like a poet like that? Another bonus for non-Gaelic speakers like me, is that MacCaig chose to write in English. If you haven't come across his work yet, do try to find some. He's a wonderful lyric poet with remarkable powers of observation. Swimming Lizard is another one I can recommend.
This Blog Post is all about my trip to Edinburgh in March and it was a restorative and stimulating sojourn after a long, wet winter in Gamrie. I am still digesting much of my experience there. There were many other pictures in the National Gallery that grabbed my attention - most notably a self-portrait by Stanley Cursiter with his wife Phyllis Hourston and his model Poppy Low. This little image doesn't really give a sense of the picture itself but I found it captivating and want to write about it some time.
Also a very old and strange (to modern eyes) painting from the late 15th century called The Death of St Ephraim and Other Scenes from the Lives of the Hermits. - Florentine School. It is on loan to the SNG and I hope it stays there as a visitor needs much time to study it. I have found out a little about the meaning of the picture and intend to study it further - and of course to write about it. The gallery staff were very helpful when I emailed some questions and it's fascinating to see how differently people made sense of their world round about 1500. The painting is, to me, very beautiful with some charming details as well as some grisly ones. I especially love the line of spiky conifers showing up against the sky on the hill in the right hand corner of the painting.
This is more than enough for one post. I'll leave you with a picture of something I stumbled upon in St Andrew's Square:
Bruce Munro's Field of Light has been touring the UK for some time but I'd never managed to see it before. I was thrilled to walk into it and many other people wandering through the square at dusk were similarly excited and there were phone cameras and tablets everywhere attempting to capture the experience. (In my case not a very good result.) 
The next blog post will be about a trip to Aberdeen Art Gallery to see the Great Tapestry of Scotland - well it was two trips as it's quite a marathon to view and worth every second of the travelling time.
