Christine De Luca

“It intrigued me that literary people raved about the poems MacDiarmid wrote while living in Shetland, especially 'On a Raised Beach', while I found them hard to appreciate. As a Shetlander and a geographer who knew the place fairly intimately, including the steep storm beaches (and lack of post-glacial isostatic uplift necessary for raised beaches), I found his battering-ram approach to using geological terminology a bit indigestible. We all have moments of epiphany when we discover something profound, and I suppose that may have been the feeling he tried to convey but, along with what felt like garbled geomorphology, theology and - in my 'book' - the heinous crime of exoticising the Shaetlan tongue and its ancestry in the Norn language, it all felt a bit contrived, as if skiting the surface. But meanwhile, living and working in Edinburgh, I was learning to keep my mouth shut, and that any criticism of MacDiarmid's poetry was unthinkable. So I ungraciously joined the ranks of those who 'quite liked a few of his early lyrics' to get me off the hook.”
― Christine De Luca, Ayont the Thistle: A gallimaufry of poetry and prose to mark the centenary (1926 - 2026) of Hugh MacDiarmid's 'A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle'