Book Notes: The Many Days, Selected Poems of Norman MacCaig

I first stumbled across the delightful poetry of Norman MacCaig via Andrew Greig's wonderful book, "At The Loch of The Green Corrie". In fact, I first heard MacCaig's name when Grieg was interviewed for some afternoon bookish programme on Radio 4, and was intrigued. The story there is that MacCaig in his last days sent the younger poet on a enigmatic Highland quest to be completed after the former's demise. The physical journey depicted, forms the arc of a series of moving stories around the theme of friendship. There are a few poems in that book form MacCaig, such as the following:

It was several years later that I stumbled across a little bookshop in Edinburgh, of which I had never heard. Nestling there among the volumes of left-wing causes, biographies of Che and Trotsky, pro-Palestinian publications, Queer Theory, and Nuclear Disarmament; a found a slim volume of the selected poems of MacCaig. It was not what I expected to emerge from the shop clutching; but it seemed a most appropriate thing to take into a grey, rainy Edinburgh afternoon.

MacCaig's poems are mostly short, and not buried beneath dense, unintelligible metaphors and obscure literary illusions. Some of them are deceptively simple. One or two, seem rather routine, until he drops in a killer a line with such force that it delights (when he describes nature), or feels like a punch in the stomach (when he exhibits grief and loss). That so many of his poems are based around, and inspired by places I know and love such as Edinburgh and Assynt, only makes them better. That he could look down and be inspired by the tiny elements of the natural world (a frog in a pool), as by the grandeur of Suilven or Stac Pollaidh is also rather special.

Whether in gentle and wry observational mood, in the throes of grief, or in the company of Highland crofters, MacCaigs little verses have a unique charm, which sometimes seems to cut right to the heart of the matter.