Top 6 - Norman MacCaig

Thanks to BBC4 for marking the centenary of Norman MacCaig on Friday night, a poet who might not always be given his due south of the border but is rightly regarded as a major poet in Scotland.

The interview first broadcast to mark his eightieth birthday showed a poet not quite as self-effacing and humble as the poems might have led me to expect. Although quiet and reflective, he was clearly a poet sure of his own worth and although by no means self-regarding or full of himself, he didn't look as if he'd be readily gainsaid or suffer fools gladly. Thus the nostrum still widely fashionable when I was being taught, that the text is the only object of literary study, was dismantled further as the poems look different after seeing the man in action.

Interestingly, and to his credit, MacCaig described his early efforts in poetry as personal and difficult in a way that experimental modernism would have been in his formative years but after a friend had queried the obcurity of his language, MacCaig determined on a more accessible style and benefitted from it for the rest of his life. Looking back through the Collected Poems, the clarity of each and every poem is immediately striking, the common sense of the man is carried over directly into the poems.

Summer Farm is the title I associate most memorably with MacCaig and I'm surprised how early in appears in the book, on page 7 out of 448, in fact. It is typical in many ways, adding brilliantly concise observation and description to a profound and well expressed idea,

A hen stares at nothing with one eye,

The picks it up.

The poet's mind is cleared of thought before,

Self under self, a pile of selves I stand

Threaded on time.

One way journey similarly celebrates a deceptively anti-intellectual attitude,

There was a time, where I take short holidays,

Before man came shooting his morals

At what created him. I can praise

What never was tortured between true and false.

This middle period of poems from the late 1960's and 70's is the strongest. Basking Shark is another encounter between the thinking MacCaig and the apparently unreflecting nature that he admires,

...I count as gain

That once I met, on sea tin-tacked with rain,

That room-sized monster with a matchbox brain.

The later poems become slightly more tangential or transcendental, less fixing their attention on the natural world. My volume here ends with an image of the poet's future growing 'smaller and smaller' but it's a wry observation still of a part with the earlier dry humour in, for example, Concerto, where

Miss pianist bows her lovely back

under the hail of notes

that she's returning, slightly damaged,

to Beethoven.

MacCaig is keen to debunk pretension and does so in a number of poems comparable perhaps to Larkin's Vers de Societe. But he is better in appreciation of the non-human, as in Culag Pier in which the gulls pick off herrings from the fishermen's catch.

You can pick six from almost anywhere in the book but I've found it more likely to find better poems towards the beginning where Night no more real reads like Baudelaire in a good mood, if that were possible.

Scottish poetry and English poetry are not necessarily the same thing, with many Scots poets using their own dialect and language to make the point. With MacCaig writing in English, he is the more accessible outside of Scotland and so it's not for me to be nominating the finest Scottish poets of the twentieth century but there aren't very many others I'd be putting alongside him on a shortlist.