I was leafing through Norman MacCaig’s Selected Poems, one of my favourite volumes. The section from his 1966 collection, titled Surroundings (yes, I ripped it off), contains some amazing poems. The drama of his writing, the creation of movement you can see and almost feel is uncanny. It astonishes again and again. Here are a few lines from Go-between:
Out of a night
that felt like a grape’s skin
an owl’s voice shuddered.
Out of the running
blackness of a river pool
a white salmon unplugged
itself and fell back
in a smash of light.
I was going to write something about why this is good, but the why surely must be obvious.
