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Squaring the Waves
"Over a huge landscape - recognisably Scotland and its border of cold ocean - Dutton's strong, clean poems strike like shafts of light through rolling clouds. They are illuminations. Each poem exists in an enormous perspective of time... Dutton's poems, less baroque than Yeats's, cast an even colder eye on life, on death, but as he passes by, Dutton conveys somehow a tremulous compassion... He stands alone in a new rank of an old tradition. I think he is one of the finest poets of our time."
Anne Stevenson
Most of these poems, or their prototypes, first appeared in Akros, Gallimaufry, Lines Review, New England Review, Scottish Poetry, Scottish Review, Seagate II (Taxvs Press, 1984), and Words.
Anne Stevenson
Most of these poems, or their prototypes, first appeared in Akros, Gallimaufry, Lines Review, New England Review, Scottish Poetry, Scottish Review, Seagate II (Taxvs Press, 1984), and Words.
60 pages, Paperback
First published December 28, 1986
About the author
G.F. Dutton
21 booksGeoffrey Fraser Dutton was an English-born scientist who lived in Scotland for most of his life. He was a mountaineer, poet, wild-water swimmer, and the creator and chronicler of a remarkable garden on the Highland boundary fault.
Dutton's studies in biological science took him to Edinburgh in 1949. He crossed paths with figures of the Scottish Renaissance in the 1950s – their famous haunt, Milne's Bar, was also the pub of preference of the Scottish Mountaineering Club – but it was not until 1973 that, with the help of Anne Stevenson, he put forward his poems for publication. In the austerity of their language, they are reflective of the landscapes which he found in his adopted homeland.
He also wrote books on wild-water swimming (Swimming Free (1972)) mountaineering (The Ridiculous Mountains (1990) and Nothing so Simple as Climbing (1993)).
In the late 1950s, Dutton and his wife Elizabeth acquired a house and eight acres of land in Perthshire, north of Blairgowrie. It was a piece of steep, rugged hillside, down which tumbled a burn through a deep gorge; and there he created what he called a "marginal" garden. Dutton managed this garden single-handedly. And between 1988 and 1994 he wrote a succession of articles about it in The Garden, the journal of the Royal Horticultural Society. He also wrote a book based on these articles, Some Branch Against the Sky: the practice and principles of marginal gardening (1997).
Dutton's studies in biological science took him to Edinburgh in 1949. He crossed paths with figures of the Scottish Renaissance in the 1950s – their famous haunt, Milne's Bar, was also the pub of preference of the Scottish Mountaineering Club – but it was not until 1973 that, with the help of Anne Stevenson, he put forward his poems for publication. In the austerity of their language, they are reflective of the landscapes which he found in his adopted homeland.
He also wrote books on wild-water swimming (Swimming Free (1972)) mountaineering (The Ridiculous Mountains (1990) and Nothing so Simple as Climbing (1993)).
In the late 1950s, Dutton and his wife Elizabeth acquired a house and eight acres of land in Perthshire, north of Blairgowrie. It was a piece of steep, rugged hillside, down which tumbled a burn through a deep gorge; and there he created what he called a "marginal" garden. Dutton managed this garden single-handedly. And between 1988 and 1994 he wrote a succession of articles about it in The Garden, the journal of the Royal Horticultural Society. He also wrote a book based on these articles, Some Branch Against the Sky: the practice and principles of marginal gardening (1997).
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