Selected Poems

This selection explores the diversity of Hugh MacDiarmid's work, from delicate lyrics derived from the Scots ballad tradition to fierce polemic. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle and On a Raised Beach - with a full glossary of its technical terms -are included, as are glossed Scots words at the foot of each page and an illuminating memoir by MacDiarmid's son, Michael Grieve.

MacDiarmid, one of various pseudonyms adopted by the prolific Scottish writer and editor Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978), wanted "A poetry wilder than a heifer / You have to milk into a gourd." But the Scottish nationalist, Marxist and modernist also wanted more, as this collection of his work intelligently demonstrates. The collective impression of the poetry is challenging, thorny, didactic, disconcerting--an enigmatic wake left behind by a writer of many contradictions. Not all are welcoming. MacDiarmid wrote in two languages: a prose- like declarative mode broken into lines and stanzas, and his own almost impassable distillation and reformation of Scots idiom, filled with archaisms. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), considered his most important work and reprinted here in its entirety, is an example of the second, mingling erudition and viscerally physical language with a forbidding ambition; on the other hand, a poem like "The Glass of Pure Water" sounds a forthrightly discursive call to "the Celt" to "overcome the whole world of wrong." MacDiarmid's work demands study, yet the rewards of a reader's effort may come slowly.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Scotland's great modernist poet (1892-1978) was a writer of enormous vitality and contradictions: an ardent Communist and Scots nationalist, philosophical materialist and metaphysical idealist, creator of earthily blunt Scots poetry and interminable poems of prosy, prolix pontification in English. The selection here includes too much dross in addition to the gold, but at least the Scots masterpiece "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" is printed in full. Some of MacDiarmid's more disciplined efforts are full of life and wit, but the passages from most of his long, later poems are, as he himself put it, "but chopped-up prose." Skipping over dated paeans to Lenin and the proletariat, one finds much of value in the man who knew that "He canna Scotland see what yet/ Canna see the Infinite,/ And Scotland in true scale to it."-- Frank J. Lepkowski, Oakland Univ., Rochester, Mich.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.