Selections

Poets for the Millennium

by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alec Finlay (Editor)

This volume surveys the life and work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who is best known for his extraordinary garden, Little Sparta, a unique “poem of place” in which poetry, sculpture, and horticulture intersect. This book directs sustained attention to Finlay the verbal artist, revealing the full breadth and richness of his poetics. It illuminates the evolution from his early years of composing plays, stories, and lyrical poems to his discovery of Concrete poetry and his emergence as a key figure in the international avant-garde of the 1960s.

Genres: Poetry

334 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2012

About the author

Ian Hamilton Finlay was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener. He was educated at Dollar Academy and joined the British Army in 1942.

At the end of the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd, before beginning to write short stories and poems, while living on Rousay, in Orkney. He published his first book, The Sea Bed and Other Stories in 1958 with some of his plays broadcast on the BBC, and some stories featured in The Glasgow Herald.

His first collection of poetry, The Dancers Inherit the Party was published in 1960 by Migrant Press with a second edition published in 1962. In 1963, Finlay published Rapel, his first collection of concrete poetry (poetry in which the layout and typography of the words contributes to its overall effect), and it was as a concrete poet that he first gained wide renown. Much of this work was issued through his own Wild Hawthorn Press, in his magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse'.

Later, Finlay began to compose poems to be inscribed into stone, incorporating these sculptures into the natural environment. This kind of 'poem-object' features in the garden Little Sparta that he and Sue Finlay created together in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classicism and neo-classicism: flutes & drums.

The neo-classical colonnade conceals the door to the armory.

Neo-classicism is classicism which has virtuously lost weight.

Classicism: armies have bands. Neo-classicism: bands have armies.

Neo-classicism: the marble arrow!

Neo-classicism is neo-classicism in a bow-tie.

[Alison Croggon · Rating 5 out of 5]

"This book serves as an excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with Finlay’s work, but it’s also a significant addition to the critical re-evaluation that continues after his death. It’s an essential purchase for anyone interested in the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century. And, not unimportantly, it’s a delight."

Full review at Overland Journal.

[Hari Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely rebarbative man, often foolish, sometimes banal, and sometimes a really wonderful writer. If writer is the right word.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't adore everything here, but what I do adore is so fine that this selection of Finlay's long and various (and strange) career is certainly worth 5 stars. Bravo to U of Calif Press for finally making a decent amount of his work available to American readers. The early short play Walking Through Seaweed is quite funny, quite absurd, and not unlike, in spirit, the reveries of Ivor Cutler, another idiosyncratic Scot. Many of the rhyming poems are funny and delightful, and much of the concrete work is think-y and satisfying. It would be great to have color reproductions of some of the Wild Hawthorn Press's cards and folders, as well as color photographs of three-dimensional "poems" in place in his garden in Scotland, but doing so would make this a much less affordable volume, so UC's compromise, giving us the texts with notes explaining the actual objects, is a good one.

[Oralmajority · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fabulous poetry, but this bland, homogenous format is anathema to the majority of Finlay's larger-than-page art.