A great treat for you today folks! Many people have said how delighted they were to come into contact with poets in the course of the #plague with whom they are unfamiliar. Well I bet very few folk know this one.
We have made much quite rightly of the doughty Josephine Neill, the Dumfries and Galloway Scots language poet of great renown now in her 85th year but she is not the oldest surviving Makar from these airts. That honour goes to Michael Crump, a poet who is unknown virtually nowadays, partly because he appeared only in a small number of places, in locally published pamphlets such as ‘like track of birds’, and partly perhaps because of the scant regard paid to poets from the south west in the past. Crump was an English teacher and hill farmer who lived near Thornhill and his poetry is a beautiful and image-full exposition of people and place. His poetry flows from the landscape and its seasons like a bright clear unstoppable mountain stream. He is 87, and now lives in Edinburgh.
Auchenstroan which he reads here beautifully,(unfortunately the first line is lost in the recording) and 'heron' which he reads like a mid Nithsdale Ted Hughes, are only two of a mesmerising body of poetry which deserves to be much better known..
Aucnenstroan
Half a moon and a midnight mist
whiten the walls of the cottage.
The tall ash is still. A dream ago
witches were cursed, gages given,
priests killed, bad bargains driven;
but now this night lies like loam
about the coffined past.
I stand here under the hill
on the very edge of the real world.
Wraiths rise outside the gloom
and finger our fate without spite
coldly. There is no wind, no sound.
The nether rock is held
by the weightless gravity of silence
and from the tunnel of the air
no star shines. This is the grey
crystal ark of the present.
The house, the tree, the grass,
tremble only in the moonlight of my mind.
This film, and the longer section below, exist as a result of a brilliant project initiated by teachers Pat Kirkby and Gregor Ross in 1984, to record the existing poetical talent in the area. Already featured here has been Willie Neill and the Dumfries poet Kirpatrick Dobie is still to come.
The longer film on Crump here:
No comments:
Post a Comment