Between Mountain and Sea: Poems from Assynt

Norman MacCaig

Polygon: £9.99

Review by Alan Taylor

When Hugh MacDiarmid died in 1978 it was left to his best friend and sparring partner, Norman MacCaig, to find the right words to describe him. It was as if MacDiarmid was “a torchlight procession of one,” said MacCaig, “lighting up the streets of my mind and some of the nasty little things that were burrowing into the corners.” It is hard to think of two men, and two poets, who were less alike than these modern makars. Physically, politically, characteristically and, most importantly, poetically, they differed in almost every respect. While MacDiarmid famously saw his job as never to lay a tit’s egg, but “to erupt like a volcano, emitting not only flame but a lot of rubbish”, MacCaig, his exact contemporary, strove to produce one perfect, exquisite egg after another.

This latest collection of MacCaig’s work concentrates on poems written about his beloved Assynt to where, freed from his duties as an Edinburgh primary school teacher, he would decamp annually with his family for an extended holiday. In an informative foreword to Between Mountain and Sea his son Ewen recalls how they went first to Assynt in 1947. Getting to know the place and its people, he notes, took time. “The landscapes were not explored by my father as a Wordsworthian rambler. He was an enthusiastic and bloodthirsty fisherman and, although he loved walking through the Assynt landscape, it was the fishing that got him out of his chair.”

Initially, they stayed in Achmelvich where the sea “goes flick-flack or the light does”. After a number of years, however, they made Inverkirkaig, near Lochinver, their base. As a child MacCaig had spent holidays with relatives in Scalpay, Harris, and when he grew older he cycled and camped all over the highlands and islands. Assynt reminded him of Scalpay. “He was, in a sense, seeking his roots,” writes Ewen. “Scalpay itself would have been unthinkable by this time – too minister-ridden, too teetotal and even further away from Edinburgh.”

MacCaig’s poetry is notable first for its clarity. Unlike MacDiarmid, for instance, he never uses words that would send you scurrying for a dictionary. Nor would he ever have used Latin or Greek or Russian tags as MacDiarmid was wont to do. MacCaig hated pretension and posturing, preferring instead to write short, sharp and apparently simple poems which require their readers to read them as they might a map. Once, on a holiday in MacCaig country, I read ‘Inverkirkaig Bay’ as I looked over it and marvelled at how the poem had pictured it perfectly in a single stanza:

“Colour is comment of the cheating eye./

This bay, these islands walk themselves away/

(When I have put my lust of looking by/

And sink unnoticed into my natural gray)

To an odd world where senses never pry.”

This is typical MacCaig, observing and recording while projecting on to what lies before him a deeper, more challenging thought. Where, what, is this “odd world where senses never pry”? The terrain he ranged over was at once underpopulated yet rich in history. Formerly thriving parishes had dwindled and by the 1950s were barely sustainable. Like Robert Frost, MacCaig revelled in rural routine, in harvests and hay-gathering, convivial gatherings and the herding of cows. Though he may have been a bloodthirsty fisherman his empathy for all creatures great and small is apparent on almost every page. He was no sentimentalist, however. Rather, he appreciated that animals, like people, found survival a constant struggle. Meanwhile, Suilven, his favourite hill, is his Amritsar, his Mecca, and a “three-inch-wide streamlet” as meaningful to him as the Amazon or the Volga.

“Who owns this landscape?” he asks in ‘A Man in Assynt’, which is about the nearest MacCaig gets to being overtly political. “Has owning anything to do with love?” Rory Watson in his introduction talks of his “wry love of the created world” and the fusion between the world of animals and the one that we inhabit. Both bemuse and amuse him and, in some cases, alarm him, such is their fragility. And he writes in praise of roads, boats, collies, thorn bushes, and, in 1977, the year before MacDiarmid’s demise, of his old Assynt friend Angus MacLeod, who “went through a company like a lamplighter”.