We were welcomed into Marie’s home on the 5th of August to discuss the work of Norman MacCaig.

As usual, we commenced our meeting by reading, in turn, more of the adventures of Thørkil as he continued his journey home to avenge the treachery of Freydan, Ulf and their evil co-conspirators. The end of the book is in sight and we believe it will be all done by Christmas so we are now moving into its dénouement.

Geoff started the readings of the poet Norman MacCaig with “Hotel Room 12th Floor” in which he watches “...a helicopter skirting like a damaged insect
the Empire State Building” which he describes as “a jumbo size dentist’s drill” This normality soon becomes usurped by ‘midnight’ which is joined by a fearful dread. In the depth of the night ‘barbarity’ arrives and even though it “is shot at by a million lit windows, all
ups and acrosses” he says it is not “so easily defeated.” He takes us back into his normal hotel room seemingly far away from the savage mayhem going on and illustrated by referencing the lawlessness of the Wild West in the “glittering canyons and gulches” of the city’s streets. He doesn’t shy away from describing to us: “police cars and ambulances racing
to the broken bones, the harsh screaming
from coldwater flats, the blood
glazed on sidewalks.” At the end of the poem he reverts to the comparison of colonional savagery and brutality by stating:
“...no stockades
can keep the midnight out.”

Geoff’s second choice was also uncompromising. It was called ‘Assissi’ and describes a visit to the cathedral there. He hits us hard in the first line: “The dwarf with his hands on backwards” is our introduction to his description of the disabled beggar who “sat, slumped like a half-filled sack
on tiny twisted legs from which
sawdust might run” Juxtaposed against this pitiful sight is the majesty and grandeur of:
“Three tiers of churches built
in honour of St. Francis, brother
of the poor...” MacCaig then swerves us away from this powerfully contrasting sight to the inside of the cathedral where he is being shown the frescoes of Giotto by a priest who informs him how the artist was able to tell stories which helped the illiterate understand “...the goodness
of God and the suffering of His Son” and as he watches tourists flocking after the priest unaware of what he describes as “the ruined temple outside,” the poor unfortunate “whose lopsided mouth
said ‘Grazie’ in a voice as sweet
as a child’s when she speaks to her mother
or a bird’s when it spoke
to St. Francis.”

Beti was next and her first choice was ‘Presents’ which consists of two opposing gifts. MacCaig says:
“I give you emptiness
I give you plenitude.” and using the metaphor of someone opening more concrete objects he advises us to “Unwrap them carefully
one’s as fragile as the other -...” He continues the illusion, expecting us to be a little mystified or even disappointed when we say “...they’re just what we wanted.” He then encourages us to “Put them on the table  by your bed” because “they’ll have gone through the door of sleep
into your head” this means, he says, that because we will have broken that barrier we will have the gifts to take with us everywhere we go and he says that we’ll “wonder,
smiling, about the fullness
you can’t add to and the emptiness
that you can fill.” Which gives us an optimistic maxim on which to base our present and future lives.

Her second poem was ‘Gray Wagtail’. He describes the little, bird admirably, of course, starting with  his description of its summer plummage “...you’re wearing
your black gorget             
above your sulphury shirt front.” quite the dandy! However, he then goes on, to describe how incredibly active and busy the little bird is:
“You dip and dip and go on dipping
your tail” to which we can all visualise the whole species and its characteristic movement but then, suddenly the little bird “shuttlecock(s) up
(death of a fly)
and parachute(s) down again.”  He addresses the bird telling it, and us, that:
“No gossip you. You’re too busy
dip-dip-dipping...” He admires the busy bird as it alights on the “...watery stone
that wears a Beau Brummel jabot of foam
at its throat.” The poet’s admiration supasses even that eighteenth-century splendifferousness in the last stanza with:
“But you put it to shame, you little dude.
You’re the eight-inch spectacular
in the summery river’s
fashion show.”

Diana then took up the baton with ‘Visiting Hour’ a contrast to the previous poem insofar as we are no longer in the open air but following the poet’s nostrils “as they go bobbing along 
green and yellow corridors.” In spite of this humorous opening it isn’t long before a very much more sombre note is rung.
“I will not feel, I will not
feel, until I have to.” says the poet while he notices the stoicism and bravery of the nurses:
“their slender waists miraculously
carrying their burden
of so much pain, so
many deaths.” In the next stanza we start to understand his fear of ‘feeling’ when he mentions the reason for his visit: “Ward 7. She lies
In a white cave of forgetfulness.” He describes the tragic situation of how distance appears to shrink
“... till there is none left
but the distance of pain that neither she nor I can cross.” In his final stanza the full pathos of the situation is accentuated by his dark form rising inside the ‘white cave’ to the sound of someone ringing the hospital bell and as it goes from the ward becoming fainter so he leaves “...behind only
books that will not be read
and fruitless fruits.” We are left with a deep sense of sadness and despair and strong empathy for his and her parting.

‘Aunt Julia,’ Diana’s second choice is a portrait of an aunt who must have ‘looked after’ the poet as a boy. She: “...spoke Gaelic
very loud and very fast.” He emphasises this by repeating it again in the fifth, the final stanza. The importance of the statement being that he “could not answer her
I could not understand her.” She was a spinster in, possibly, both senses of the word because when she was not wearing mens’ boots he remembers watching her “... strong foot
stained with peat
paddling with the treadle of the spinning wheel.” We can imagine this tough, hard working woman through his remembrances of her, the memory of “...the only house
where I’ve lain at night
in the absolute darkness
of a box bed” and the whole of stanza four in which he lists the things she was associated with in his mind: “She was buckets
and water flouncing into them.
She waswinds pouring wetly
round house ends.
She was brown eggs, black skirts
and a keeper of threepenny bits
in a teapot.” MacCaig then repeats his statemnt about his not understanding her Gaelic and mentions that even when he had learned some it was too late. She now lies in a grave in Luskentyre but, he says, he hears her welcoming him “with a seagull’s voice” and hears her anger as he wasn’t able to answer her many questions. There is some real love between the little boy and his aunt in spite of their linguistic alienation and disparity in age.

Suzanne treated us to another bird poem, a definite speciality of Norman MacCaig’s. Her selection started with ‘Curlew’. As in Beti’s poem about the gray wagtail the poet speaks directly to the bird. He says that he saw the curlew’s cousin the day before “a whimbril
that, when close to, looks like yourself
seen at a distance.” But he then suggests that no-one could possibly mistake its “tittery call” for the wonderful “trailing bubbles of music” the curlew produces: “Music as desolate, as beautiful
as your loved places,
mountainy marshes and glistening mud-flats
by the stealthy sea.”

Her second contribution was ‘Toad’ and yet again our poet addresses it directly demanding “Stop looking like a purse.” and although he then asks “How could a purse
squeeze under the rickety door and sit
full of satisfaction, in a man’s house?” he admires the animal, in fact he says “I love you for being a toad”. This is in direct contrast to fellow poet, Philip Larkin’s feelings about toad which he equates to ‘work’ to the ‘daily grind’: “Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison..” MacCaig’s description of the toad as a purse with its mouth forward like the purse’s opening and then his description of the movement coming towards him “...on your four corners
right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot” is topped by him saying how he loves him for
"crawling like a Japanese wrestler
and for not being frightened.” The end of the poem has the poet feeling uplifted. The dark part of his thoughts being lit a little brighter by the encounter with the admirable toad.

Marie read ‘Birds all singing’ an eight stanza poem written in 1953 with a rhyming pattern of ABBCAC in each. In the first one MacCaig sets out the thesis that the glorious sound of songbirds is not down to wooing a mate “Or so we are told” he says, but to mark out their territory. He illustrates it in stating that the act which  “...tantalise and transfigure” the morning air are coarse descriptions of and warnings to any other male bird “That dare intrude a wing
In their half-acre...” He continues the juxtaposition of sheer beauty and coarseness when he says: “Come out and fight, they cry, and roulades of
Tumbling-down sweetness and ascending bliss
Elaborate unrepeatable ancestries;” After three stanzas of such anomalies he introduces a “human figure” below who misinterprets the song “And feels it innocent, calls it pastoral.” Nevertheless, the human falsely, at the same time imagines the world as his territory as though it was formed entirely for him and for his kind. “Where all is for his sake;
It is the touchstone proving him pure gold.” He too creates
“Territories of existance, private states
Of being where trespassers are shot at sight;” In stanza seven MacCaig proffers his main belief that in the trees or below “...nothing truly lies
In its own lucidity.” He goes on to state that as time goes on the madness of a world
“Where birds shake savage cries
Like clenched fists in the world’s uncaring face.” Man too, he says
“...with straws of singing in his hair
Strolls in his Bedlam transfiguring every fact.” Which leads us to his final line:
“Time topples bird and man out of myth.” It is a desolate poem with an underlining plea, written at the time of nuclear threat for us all to come to our senses and just get along with one-another.

Marie’s second poem, ‘Discolourations,’ contains two stanzas; unrhyming and only using capital letters for main nouns and after a full stop like all the previous selections apart from ‘Birds all singing’ which was written in the poet’s youth. MacCaig brings together the idea of the primary colours with the privileged in society. He says how moved he is by the faded colours of poverty and defeat brought about by failed birthright. His simile “... like the faces
of old people (where we see suffering - but call it
character).” indicates the sincerity of appearance. The discolourations that he says he is moved by are all associated with those found near or on: rough sleepers, cheap rooms, men drinking in doorways and in tenement stairs. He then states that:
“There’s more truth in a fisherman’s jersey
than in the works of Hegel, more scarifice
in the washerwoman’s shawl
than in a world of vocabularies.” In a complete contrast to these musings on the ordinary the second stanza starts with the glory of bright, more showy colour. He rejoices in “Glossy apple, bulged with red being
lingfisher, metallic on your dipping twig
and your shell cousin, mussel, blue beam in lustrous water” and goes on in this manner until he, in praising the glory of the sun, also feels wounded when it is “...withered
to a faded chrysanthemun
that scarcely stains
the brown fog that fades it.”

Elaine’s first reading complements this last sentiment. Her choice was "Frost and thin fog”‘which was written in 1951 and takes the form of four quatrains and although it sticks to the convention of a capital letter at the beginning of each line it is less formal than the previous 1950’s one as there is no rhyming scheme.  It is a poem about winter in which MacCaig describes the sun as “cold and melancholy” who
“hangs his red O above suburban gardens” We then get numerous well observed and delightfully expressed visions, close up, of the effects of the frost “The harsh air files the leaf stalk through
And lowers the rattling leaf down through the branches” for instance. He then goes on to regret the passing of summer and how everything now is spoilt. 
“Gas jets and fiery globes of flowers
Are all a darkness now in which there wander
Small creaking voices that can say
Nothing at all but Winter, winter.”

Elaine turned to the poem ‘Moorings’ for her and our last reading of the day. In it the poet describes, in his inimitable way, a scene containing an old boat which has been moored for a while. It is moonlight and he animates the inanimate object “The dingy nods at nothing
It paws the bright water...” He describes an old rusty, broken chain in a similar manner:
“A ruined chain lies reptile
Tied to the ground by grasses.” Later an otter pokes his nose above the water which the poet describes as “The cork that cannot be...” and then the poet surpasses himself by the description of a bird’s obsession with the otter’s nose:
“It’s piped at, screamed at, sworn at
By an elegant oystercatcher
On furious orange legs.” He even animates the sea: “With a sort of idle swaying
The tide breathes in.” In the last stanza he returns to the abandoned boat and it is still pawing the “bright water” and envisaging itself clearing the waves that will challenge it the next time it has to “..clear the hurdles
That ring the Point of Stoer.”

I would like to personally thank Marie for leading us to this great poet. It has been difficult for me to write this series of notes as Norman MacCaig’s work is so complete, so fine that he was saying everything so clearly and perfectly that it left very little to say at all. No wonder Seamus Heaney and Ted hughes and Douglas Dunn regarded him so highly! I now rank him with that exalted company. Thank you all for your contributions I enjoyed them all.

Marie then topped off this splendid session with lovely cakes and hot and cold beverages. Thank you again Marie.

gw