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  #1  
Unread 04-27-2001, 03:53 AM
SteveWal SteveWal is offline
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As requested by Bob, here's some Norman MacCaig.

He was Scottish, often wrote about nature (how old-fashioned can you get?), and his poems are often full of startlingly apt images. Is he a great poet? I don't know. But I always enjoy his poems.

<u>Starling on a green lawn</u>

He makes such a business of going somewhere
he's like a hopping with a bird in it.

The somewhere's an any place, which he recognises at once.
His track is zag-zag zig-zag.

He angles himself to the sun and his blackness
becomes something fallen from a stained-glass window.

He's a guy King, a guy Prince, though his only royal habit
is to walk with his hands clasped behind his back.

Now he's flown up like a mad glove on to a fence post.
He squinnies at the world and draws a cork from a bottle.


<u>Fisherman</u>

Look at my hands -
pickled like vegetables. Look at the secret crystals
in my knee joints and shoulders. My eyelids' rims
are drawn in blood, I stare at horizons
through eyes bleached with salt other than theirs.

I step ashore on to a lurching world.
I go to bed between waves that sails me
into the dogfish nightmare, the horror film#
of crabs.

Yet somewhere mermaids, whom I don't believe in,
are supple with their combs, are supply singing,
and (though I don't believe it) the halcyon nests
bluely in a blue miracle.

Tomorrow I'll go out again - the god of the sea,
who doesn't exist, has strayed my wits -
to sail over treasures and under treasures,
and when I come back my bunched hands
will be full of things no one will see -
that the loud auctioneer
could sell to nobody.


His poems are full of a genuinely observed strangeness, there's nothing "clever" about them, and he's not trying to show off like a bunch of Oxbridge-educated Martian poets.

------------------
Steve Waling

[This message has been edited by SteveWal (edited April 27, 2001).]
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  #2  
Unread 04-27-2001, 10:27 PM
Robert J. Clawson Robert J. Clawson is offline
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“... here's some Norman MacCaig...His poems are full of a genuinely observed strangeness, there's nothing "clever" about them, and he's not trying to show off...”

Steve, you’ve said this fellow is a better poet than Craig Raine? I also somewhat enjoy these poems, but I don’t find them artistically comparable with Raine’s “Kalahari Desert,” not even close.

In "Starling on a Green Lawn," I’m surprised that you don’t find the following an example of MacCaig trying to be clever:

“He makes such a business of going somewhere
he's like a hopping with a bird in it…”

And he’s pretty academically imagistic with,

“He angles himself to the sun and his blackness
becomes something fallen from a stained-glass window.”

For me, that’s too much “Oxford” for a starling on a lawn.


Fisherman

"Look at my hands -
pickled like vegetables."

I like this (if he’s just off his boat).

“Yet somewhere mermaids...”

Sorry, but fishing poems with mermaids live as dangerously as AMERICA, SOUTH poems with kudzu.

In the west of that notorious island west of Scotland lives a poet named Richard Murphy. Some of his work is excellent and he doesn’t sound like an Oxford prince. I think you might like him.

Bob
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Unread 04-29-2001, 05:43 AM
SteveWal SteveWal is offline
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Bob-

I'd agree that neither of the two poems is as good as "In the Kalahari Desert", unfortunately, that's the exception in Craig Raine's work, which is more like "A Martian Writes A Postcard Home," and of late seems to be getting worse and worse.

I don't find MacCaig among my favourite list; he's more of a "quite like" poet. I do think that, for him, image-making was as natural as water: I think he genuinely saw the world through a haze of correspondances. Or possibly whisky. Having met him once, I can say he was a lovely man, but that's not criticism that's prejudice. I've met Craig Raine on a couple of occassions, and on the second his ego seemed even bigger than the first time, though with less reason.

It could be, of course, that I chose a couple of weaker poems. His Collected Poems is pretty large: he was publishing from the 50's to the 90's. I still think the sparrow poem knocks the Martian poem into a cocked hat, even if MacCaig never quite gets to the heights of "In the Kalahari Desert."

There's a thread here, methinks, about how ambition and talent can get misdirected, how good poets can lose themselves, because Raine certainly has: too tied up in the cult of himself. I don't know if there's any American instances of this phenomenon?



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Steve Waling
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Unread 04-29-2001, 09:15 PM
Robert J. Clawson Robert J. Clawson is offline
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"I don't know if there's any American instances of this phenomenon?"

None whatsoever, Steve.

Bob
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