Surroundings

by Norman MacCaig

The Phoenix Living Poets series. Choice Of The Poetry Book Society yellow band intact.

58 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1966

About the author

MacCaig was born in Edinburgh and divided his time, for the rest of his life, between his native city and Assynt in the Scottish Highlands. He registered as a conscientious objector during World War II. In 1967 he was appointed Fellow in Creative Writing at Edinburgh. He became a reader in poetry in 1970, at the University of Stirling.

Reviews

[Boy Blue · Rating 3 out of 5]

MacCaig seems to have taken his jacket off and loosened his tie with this one. Some of these poems are pure flights of whimsy. Something like:

Frogs

Frogs sit more solid
than anything sits. In mid-leap they are
parachutists falling
in a free fall. They die on roads
with arms across their chests and
heads high.

I love frogs that sit
like Buddha, that fall without
parachutes, that die
like Italian tenors.

Above all, I love them because,
pursued in water, they never
panic so much that they fail
to make stylish traingles
with their ballet dancer's
legs.

And then a lot of MacCaig's poems are beuatifully simple.

Old Poet

The alder tree
shrivelled by the salt wind
has lived so long
it has carried and sheltered
its own weight
of nests.

I also noticed with this collection that MacCaig has a tendency to define things by their absence, or explain things by anything other than their essence. Rather than painting a tree, he'll paint all the things a tree is not. He does also have the ability to just nail the description of something in a surprising yet elegant manner with a single phrase.

Along with the above two poems I enjoyed Progress, Two Shepherds, and;

Four o'clock blackbird

Just when it was possible to think
the darkness was less dark,
I heard a blackbird thoughtfully
saying what he thought
from a hawthorn tree I'm fond of.
He was slow, but precise - How lucky
for him not to be restricted, like tits,
to a mechanical rote of notes played
with pianola exactness. And if he didn't have
the acrobatic aplomb of
the wise thrush that says everything twice over,
like Browning,
he was bronze to the thrush's silver
and, between night and day,
made a rich sound that said,
thoughtfully and unhurriedly,
from the heart of a hawthorn tree
I'm more fond of than ever,
that to be between
night and day is to be
between two richnesses and
in a third.