from Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1990)
#ScottishWriters
Sssnnnwhuffffll? Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl? Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g g… Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhafl f… gm grawwwww grf grawf awfgm graw g…
I am waiting for you. I have been travelling all morning… and not eaten. I am lying at the edge of the bush on a dusty path that leads from th…
A Far Cool Beautiful Thing, Van… blue The Dear Green Plaice Glasgow Homage to Zukofsky
Colour Poems was a suite of five… in an edition of 100 copies in May… using between two and twelve colou… They were printed by John Taylor… Images of the prints from this fol…
jollymerry hollyberry jollyberry merryholly happyjolly
“A man’s a man for a’ that” – how… Traipsing with his plough, the rur… Swaggering down the lea-rigs, talk… Sweating his sickly verses to enti… Lassies he’d never see again, stru…
Kiss me with rain on your eyelashe… come on, let us sway together, under the trees, and to hell with…
Others are open. You give a high… as you win the Prospero stakes, an… bury your books deeper than any au… could find them sound or unsound. Did you ‘die a papist’, hate dogs,…
Push the boat out, compañeros, push the boat out, whatever the se… Who says we cannot guide ourselves through the boiling reefs, black a… the enemy of us all makes sure of…
Three o’clock. The bus lurches round into the sun. ‘D’s this go –… he flops beside me – 'right along… —Oh tha’s, tha’s all right, see I… got to get some Easter eggs for th…
–We come in peace from the third p… Would you take us to your leader? –Bawr stretter! Bawr. Bawr. Stre… –This is a little plastic model of the solar system, with working…
A cup capsizes along the formica, slithering with a dull clatter. A few heads turn in the crowded ev… An old man is trying to get to his… from the low round stool fixed to…
At ten I read Mayakovsky had died… learned my first word of Russian,… watched my English teacher poke hi… with a well-chewed HB and get the… to join his easy mocking of my ess…
Guten Morgan was a limited editio… ‘Less is not better’ ‘Poetry comes and goes’ ‘Rainbow’ ‘Fled’
With a ragged diamond of shattered plate-glass a young man and his girl are falling backwards into a shop-… The young man’s face