The Touch of Time: New & Selected Poems

By Stewart Conn

The Touch of Time is a comprehensive retrospective of the work of one of Scotland's leading poets drawing on ten previous books published over five decades. The new work here pursues the themes of his earlier Bloodaxe collections Stolen Light: Selected Poems (1999), Ghosts at Cockcrow (2005) and The Breakfast Room (2010). With what Professor Carla Sassi sees as 'his thoughtful attention to small details, his redeeming gaze, his formal control of impeccably constructed verses, and his deep and warm humanity', he movingly explores everyday events and revelations, and how - like our lives and those of our loved ones - they are transformed by time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780371306

Book preview

STEWART CONN

THE TOUCH OF TIME

New & Selected Poems

The Touch of Time is a comprehensive retrospective of the work of one of Scotland’s leading poets drawing on ten previous books published over five decades. The new work here pursues the themes of his earlier Bloodaxe collections Stolen Light: Selected Poems (1999), Ghosts at Cockcrow (2005) and The Breakfast Room (2010). With what Professor Carla Sassi sees as ‘his thoughtful attention to small details, his redeeming gaze, his formal control of impeccably constructed verses, and his deep and warm humanity’, he movingly explores everyday events and revelations and how – like our lives and those of our loved ones – they are transformed by time.

‘Stewart Conn is one of Scotland’s most skilled and wide-ranging poets. A sympathetic, if quite unsentimental, treatment of the natural world, or the rural one at least, does run throughout his poetry, but so do the themes of love, family relationships, the nature and power of art, and that time-honoured subject of poetry – the fragility and transitoriness of life itself’ –

DAVID MCCORDICK

, Scottish Literature in the Twentieth Century.

‘He stands among the indispensable poets of modern and contemporary Scotland’ –

DOUGLAS DUNN

, The Dark Horse.

COVER PICTURE

Horizontal sundial made by Joseph Williamson, Aberdeen, 1728

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF SCOTLAND

STEWART CONN

The Touch of Time

NEW & SELECTED POEMS

for Judy

Dame, de qui toute ma joie vient…

GUILLAUME DE MACHAUT

, c. 1300–77

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sections I-VII are extracted from Stolen Light: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1999), which in turn drew on Thunder in the Air (Akros, Preston, 1967) and The Chinese Tower (MacDonald, Edinburgh, 1967); Stoats in the Sunlight (1968), An Ear to the Ground (1972) and Under the Ice (1978), all Hutchinson, London; In the Kibble Palace (Bloodaxe Books, 1987), At the Aviary (Snail Press, Plumstead, South Africa, 1992), and The Luncheon of the Boating Party (1992) and In the Blood (1995), both Bloodaxe Books. Other poems are reinstated from these volumes or are from Distances: a personal evocation of people and places (Scottish Cultural Press, 2001). The poems tend to be grouped thematically rather than observing strict chronology. A number of revisions and excisions have been made.

Sections VIII and IX represent respectively Ghosts at Cockcrow

(2005)

and The Breakfast Room

(2010)

, both from Bloodaxe and the latter incorporating The Loving-Cup (Mariscat Press, 2007). Section X includes poems from Estuary (Mariscat Press, 2012).

Gratitude is expressed to all the publishers named and, for poems in the final Section or hitherto unacknowledged, to the editors of Carapace, Edinburgh Review, The Herald, New Writing Scotland, The North, Poetry International (San Diego), Poetry Scotland, The Scotsman, The Scottish Review of Books, Southlight, The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement.

Special thanks to Hamish Whyte for discerning guidance.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

I

Todd

Ferret

Farm

Harelaw

Country Dance

Ayrshire Farm

Todd: a sequence

Reading Matter

Stoats in the Sunlight

The Shed

Forebears

On Craigie Hill

Craggy Country

Family Tree

Farm Funeral

II

Afternoon

Thunder in the Air

Under Creag Mhor

In a Simple Light

Setting

Margins

The Chinese Tower

Old Actor

North Uist

Driving Through Sutherland

Summer, Assynt

At Coruisk

Marriage a Mountain Ridge

Orkney Shore

The Predators

III

The Lilypond

Kilchrenan

A Sense of Order

Sunday walk

Period piece

Cranworth Street

Street scene

Portents

Southpark

The salon

Costume piece

Botanics

After the Party

Family Visit

To My Father

Reawakening

In the Kibble Palace

Tremors

Before Dark

Arrivals

Witnesses

Two Poems

Night incident

Ghosts

Seize the Day

Return Visit

IV

Under the Ice

In the Gallery

Kitchen Maid

Visiting Hour

Afternoon Visit

Snowman

Snowfall

At the Airport

Lothian Burn

Moving In

Offshore

End of Season, Drumelzier

Cherry Tree, at Dusk

Bedtime Story

The Eye-shade

Recovery

At Amersham

In Monte Mario

Springtime

V

The Luncheon of the Boating Party

IAlphonse

IIThe Baron

IIIUnknown man

IVMadame Renoir

VRenoir

Renoir in Orkney

Burial Mound

Monflanquin

Fort Napoléon

Lot-et-Garonne

Picture Framer

The Boathouse

Skye Poems

On arrival

Dawn, Drinan

Reminder

Sabbath

The islanders to the newly-weds

Bog myrtle

October Week

VI

Sights and Sounds

On the Water

Interior

Pilanesberg

Leopard

Jedibe Camp

Trust

Water Two

Over the desert

VII

Ayrshire Coast

Map of Coningham

Spring

FROM

Early Days

Connections

Mirror image

Wild Flowers

Terra Firma

Peace and Plenty

Stolen Light

First Light

Return to Provence

Jawbone Walk

Inheritance

Losing Touch

ILosing touch

IIVantage points

IIIOratorio

Funerals

White-out

Night Sky

Intricacies

Above the Storm

VIIIfrom Ghosts at Cockcrow

Visitation

In the Garden

Ministrations

Heirloom

Growing Up

City Interlude

Autumn Walk

Edinburgh Thaw

Close Names

Cappella Nova at Greyfriars’

Footage of RLS

Writer’s Block

Ghosts at Cockcrow

Appearances

Notre-Dame, Dijon

Musée des Beaux-Arts

Vézelay

Hotels

In transit

Roull of Corstorphin

1  Roull Posited

2  At Court

3  To his Cousin in Aberdene

4  His Cousin’s Reply

5  Roull on Musik Fyne

6  Insomnia

7  Plaint

8  Time of Plague

9  To his Wife

10  In Seiknes

11  Roull on Death

12  Ghost of Roull

POST SCRIPTUM

The Barber-Surgeons to James IV

In the Museum of Scotland

Eclipse

My Lady

On the Summit

Piazza del Campidoglio

The Actor’s Farewell

Angel with Lute

IXfrom The Breakfast Room

The Duck Shooters

Conundrum

Just How It Was

The Camellia House

Dougalston

Rain, Rain, Rain

Homecoming Scotland

Gondola

Early Call

The Breakfast Room

Delivery

Sleepless Knight

Awakenings

Double-take

The Loving-cup

Early Morning

Arcadia

Soloist

Beaux Arts Trio

The Life Ahead

Homecoming

Sounds of Music

Sir Robert de Septvans

Carpe Diem

X   New Poems

On the Viaduct

Revenants

Knowing the Code

Juggler

An Absence of Crocuses

Field Marks

Nocturne

A Hair in the Gate

In the Garden

Wellcome

Irish Giant

Off the Leash

Tide

Off Iona

Estuary

Fisherman

Resolve

Sea Crossing

Italian Suite

In the Basilica

Train journey

Urbino

In the Palazzo

Room of Angels

Horse chestnuts

The Rooms of the Sweet Oranges

Upholstery

Fox

Hydrangeas

Interloper

Three Poems for Ellis

ICelebrants

IIVisitors

III Stone lion

About the Author

Copyright

I

Todd

My father’s white uncle became

    arthritic and testamental in

    lyrical stages. He held cardinal sin

was misuse of horses, then any game

won on the sabbath. A Clydesdale

    to him was not bells and sugar or declension

    from paddock, but primal extension

of rock and soil. Thundered nail

turned to sacred bolt. And each night

    in the stable he would slaver and slave

    at cracked hooves, or else save

bowls of porridge for just the right

beast. I remember I lied

    to him once, about oats: then I felt

    the brand of his loving tongue, the belt

of his own horsey breath. But he died,

when the mechanised tractor came to pass.

    Now I think of him neighing to some saint

    in a simple heaven or, beyond complaint,

leaning across a fence and munching grass.

Ferret

More vicious than stoat or weasel

because caged, kept hungry, the ferrets

were let out only for the kill:

an alternative to sulphur and nets.

Once one, badly mauled, hid

behind a treacle-barrel in the shed.

Throwing me back, Matthew slid

the door shut. From outside

the window, I watched. He stood

holding an axe, with no gloves.

Then it sprang; and his sleeves

were drenched in blood

where the teeth had sunk. I hear

its high-pitched squeal,

the clamp of its neat steel

jaws. And I remember

how the axe flashed, severing

the ferret’s head,

and how its body kept battering

the barrels, long after it was dead.

Farm

The sun drills the shire through and through

till the farm is a furnace, the yard

a quivering wickerwork of flame. Pitchforks

rise and fall, bales are fiery ingots.

Straws sputter like squibs. Stones

explode. From the byre, smack on time,

old Martha comes clattering out

with buttered bannocks and milk in a pail.

Todd, his face ablaze, swims back

in what shadow there is. Hugh and John

stretch out among sheaves. Hens squabble

for crusts; a dog flicks its tail

at a cleg; blueflies bunch like grapes.

Still the sun beats down, a hammer

on tin. And high overhead vapour-trails

drift seaward, out past Ailsa Craig.

Harelaw

Ploughlands roll where limekilns lay

     seeping in craters. Where once dense

     fibres oozed against gatepost and fence

till staples burst, firm wheatfields sway;

     and where quarries reeked, intense

with honeysuckle, a truck dumps load

     upon load of earth, of ash and slag

     for the raking. Spliced hawsers drag

roots out and wrench the rabbit wood

     apart as though some cuckoo fugue

had rioted. On this mossy slope

     that raindrops used to drill and drum

     through dusk, no nightjar flits nor numb

hawk hangs as listening foxes lope

     and prowl; no lilac shadows thumb

the heavy air. This holt was mine

     to siege and plunder, here I caged

     rare beasts or swayed royally on the aged

backs of horses – here hacked my secret sign,

     strode, wallowed, ferreted, rampaged.

But acres crumple and the farm’s new image

     spreads over the old. As I face

     its change, a truck tips litter; hens assess

bright tins, then peck and squawk their rage.

     The truck spurts flame and I have no redress.

Country Dance

Before the advent of the combine

the big mill would lumber from farm

to farm, spouting steam and flame:

stooks extending to the horizon

and beyond, weathered by sun or rain.

Intricate as a dance, was the tying

of the sheaves, on the ground

or against one thigh, to a communal

rhythm; then their hoisting

in the stackyard, forks flashing;

and as though riding on air,

the man on top, under steady

bombardment, circling and weaving,

gold ramparts rising round him

to a music compelling as any eightsome.

Ayrshire Farm

Every new year’s morning the farmers

would meet at Harelaw with their guns

for the shoot. Mungo red in the face,

Matthew hale as a tree, John huge

in old leather. The others in dribs

and drabs, shotguns over their shoulders,

bags flopping at their sides, collars up.

We’d set out across the north park,

the glaur on our leggings freezing

as we left the shelter of the knowes.

No dogs. Even the ferrets on this day

of days left