Scottish Roses

  On a visit to Glasgow at the end of the summer I chanced across the Scottish Poetry Rose Garden in Queens Park, just up the road from where we were staying. Walking around the pathways inlaid with the names and dates of Scottish poets from Henryson and Dunbar to Edwin Morgan and Carol Anne Duffy (as well as some lesser-known figures like Violet Jacob (1863-1946)), some of the stones decorated with fallen rose-petals, I was reminded of the astounding richness of this tradition and the vital contribution and influence it has exerted on the history of poetry in English, even as (like Scotland itself) it's had to continually fight for recognition of its distinctive voice and linguistic vigour. 

   It seemed fitting to find this craggy monument to Hugh MacDiarmid at the head of the garden, that dogged proponent of Scottish nationalism who argued for poetry as an ambitious, polymathic tool for change, very much with a modernist, internationalist agenda at its heart. The poem inscribed on the stone is a brief but resonant quatrain:

"The rose of all the world is not for me.

I want for my part

Only the little white rose of Scotland

That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart."

   MacDiarmid's white rose has become a symbol of Scottish independence, in fact, since SNP MPs took to wearing the flowers to parliament for the Queens Speech in 2015. As Scotland is dragged towards the fiasco of Brexit, an impending calamity which the majority of its citizens never voted for, it will be intriguing to see if they're given another opportunity to make a choice about their own independence and whether they will use it to finally break away from our increasingly disunited kingdom in order to remain a part of Europe.

Autumn in Grasmere

Dove Cottage from its garden

   Had an idyllic few days in the Lake District over the half-term, my first excursion to the region. I could wax Wordsworthian about the extraordinary autumnal landscapes I walked through until the rare-breed cows come home but of course you've heard it all before. What I found amazing was how the mountains, lakes and woods in fact lived up to the centuries-old hype and despite a highly-developed tourist-trade in the area, seem to remain irreducible to chocolate-box prettification or the "aw-shucks vision of immensities" William Logan mocked Charles Wright for. (Strange how we use "unspoilt" as a term of approval as though all natural environments were ultimately destined for spoliation.)

View from Hawth Castle

 The landscapes and bewilderingly wide skies, across which patterns of cloud-filtered light continually roam and shift, retain something inhospitably wild and barren about them which is the opposite of the "cramped and fearful" box-life of the indentured Londoner.(The quote's from MacDiarmid's great poem 'Bagpipe Music', quite germane to what I'm talking about). No wonder in the late 18th century certain ladies would be advised to observe the Lakes with the aid of a Claude glass - basically a mirror that would frame and render picturesque the otherwise unassimably natural abundance in front of them -  lest the vertiginous wilderness would throw them into a swoon.

Lake Windermere



 Now many of us use our smartphones and tablets for a similar mediation, a similar inability to take on board the enormous unhumanness of these locations society has yet to monetise and co-opt. Places where the depressing corollary of post-modernism - "il n'y a pas d'hors-texte" - feels like it's unravelled and where the outside goes on forever.

In Their Own Words

    If you missed it here's the first part of an interesting new BBC4 series comprised of old BBC footage of 20th Century poets edited together in chronological fashion to form a (very) basic history of British poetry. The opening clips of Pound show what an amazing place the castle in the Tyrol he came to live in towards the end of life was: he seems serene there, as against the impression the last fragmentary Cantos and Donald Hall's Paris Review interview (1960 I think) give of an old man "mired in depression". Great to see Hugh MacDiarmid speaking on film, especially in the context of the forthcoming Scottish referendum ("England must disappear") and equally RS Thomas talking in his flinty way about Wales and the way religion and poetry co-existed for him - were, in effect, one. 
     Auden on Parkinson is an amusing oddity, although Betjeman on the same programme is merely a low-brow showman (not shaman). And if I hear Dylan Thomas doing that ridiculous hammy singsong on 'Do Not Go Gentle' once more this year I'm going to scream:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04dg1lz/great-poets-in-their-own-words-1-making-it-new-19081955
   Afterword: the link to iPlayer is no longer live but you can catch the two parts of Great Poets In Their Own Words on YouTube. It's chopped into 15minute segments so I'm not going to provide links to all the parts.