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.
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Steve Waling
[This message has been edited by SteveWal (edited April 27, 2001).]
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