This Life, This Life: New & Selected Poems 1970-2006

By Andrew Greig

What are the contours of a life? For Andrew Greig: childhood, adolescence, the country then the city, sex, love, marriage, break-ups and breakdowns personal and political, mountain adventures, illness and recovery, increased awareness of mortality and the preciousness of the moments left, late love… they're all here in these wildly diverse, affirmative, open-hearted poems. As a poet and latterly as a novelist, Andrew Greig is one of Scotland's most esteemed writers. Each of his poetry books has been distinctively different, from the early and late poems rooted in the natural world, to the game-playing extended narratives of exultation and risk, from human love to the mountaineering poems. But this selection covering 35 years of his poetry shows how the thrust of all his work is the re-enchantment of this life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780370231

Andrew Greig

Andrew Greig is a Scottish writer living in Edinburgh and Orkney. He has written seven novels, a variety of non-fiction books, and nine volumes of poetry, including Found At Sea, Getting Higher: Complete Mountain Poems and This Life, This Life: New and Selected Poems. His collection The Order of the Day was a Poetry Book Society choice.

Book preview

ANDREW GREIG

THIS LIFE, THIS LIFE

New & Selected Poems 1970-2006

What are the contours of a life? For Andrew Greig: childhood, adolescence, the country then the city, sex, love, marriage, break-ups and breakdowns personal and political, mountain adventures, illness and recovery, increased awareness of mortality and the preciousness of the moments left, late love… they’re all here in these wildly diverse, affirmative, open-hearted poems.

As a poet and latterly as a novelist, Andrew Greig is one of Scotland’s most esteemed writers. Each of his poetry books has been distinctively different, from the early and late poems rooted in the natural world, to the game-playing extended narratives of exultation and risk, from human love to the mountaineering poems. But this selection covering 35 years of his poetry shows how the thrust of all his work is the re-enchantment of this life.

‘Andrew Greig is a Scottish poet of sensitivity and resilience. He deals with high-risk situations – from mountaineering to love – and is particularly good at presenting the gamut of feelings involved in rites of passage: high endeavour, commitment, holding back, drift, release’

–

EDWIN MORGAN

.

‘When I first read the poems, I started writing down the ones I was really impressed by, but I gave that up after I’d written down 4 of the first 5. I doubt if there is a weak one in the collection. They interest me for their subject-matter and use of it – very subtle, often very unexpected, always on a nicely serious level, not without wit’

–

NORMAN MACCAIG

.

COVER PAINTING

Valley of the Leaf by David Blackburn (2003)

PASTEL ON PAPER, 65 x 50cm

(COURTESY OF HART GALLERY, LONDON)

Andrew Greig

THIS LIFE, THIS LIFE

NEW & SELECTED POEMS 1970-2006

To the Beloved

Whoever brought me here

will have to take me home

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book includes poems selected from Andrew Greig’s collections White Boats (Garret Arts, 1973), Men On Ice (Canongate, 1977) and Surviving Passages (Canongate, 1982), and from A Flame in Your Heart (1986), The Order of the Day (1990), Western Swing (1994) and Into You (2001), all published by Bloodaxe Books, with the addition of a group of new, previously uncollected poems. A Flame in Your Heart was a collaboration with Kathleen Jamie, broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in a shortened version under the title Rumours of Guns in 1985; the epigraph is from a song by Marcue, Benjemin, Durham and Seiler.

Some of the new poems first appeared in The Dark Horse.

Epigraphs on the preceding page and before the new poems are both by Rumi, from The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks & John Mayne (Harper Collins, USA, 1995; Penguin Books, 1999).

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

FROM

WHITE BOATS

(1973)

Night Shift

Return of Venture

Maxwell

After the Affair

Dido

Evening Sketch

FROM

MEN ON ICE

(1977)

Captain Zen?

Poet’s Tale

Axe-Man’s Confession

On Falling

Grimpeur’s Explanation

Praising the Woman

Zen on Poetry

Hoof

Next Morning

To Get Higher

Poet’s Night Song & Benediction

FROM

SURVIVING PASSAGES

(1982)

In the Tool-shed

Confessions of an Airman

A Man Is Driving

Time, Out for the Night

The Elephants

from Dissenting Passages

Wordscape: Elegy for Angus

Melissa

The Glove

A Night Journey

In Galloway

Portobello Beach

Bus to Izmir

We Spoke of Falling

FROM

A FLAME IN YOUR HEART

(1986)

‘One by one they will return’

‘Then we heard the guns around Gravesend’

‘The past blooms anywhere’

‘May you go your rounds’

‘A summer seen through perspex’

‘I wanted excitement’

‘Shaken awake in the dark’

‘He was mine, no doubt about it’

‘I went to visit Tim last night’

‘I watch my tracers arc and seed’

‘Say it straight, then’

‘Billy – shell splinter nicked his optic nerve’

‘Mercifully you never see them coming’

‘In an airless living-room on the new estate’

FROM

THE ORDER OF THE DAY

(1990)

Back Again

Interlude on Mustagh Tower

Sandy, Topping Out

Entering Askole

The Winter Climbing

Three Above Namche Bazaar

Shetland

About Tess

Still

Annie, in Spring

Treaty

Gulf

Annie, in November

Covert Action

Young American

D, in a Checked Shirt

D, Riding

Heart & Irish

Up the Baobab

The Maid & I

The House-Builder Variations

Mexico

FROM

WESTERN SWING

(1994)

from

PART I

: The Quest & The Company

Prologue

Lights up dim

Stella writes from Hospital

Stella, escaping

Cut to

from

PART II

: At the Up & Down Disco, Kathmundu

Inside the voodoo

Conversations on a flying carpet

Intermission

from

PART III

: Travails in the High Atlas

To resume the résumé

Into the drylands

Tourists & terrorists

In the last village

A carry-out episode

A munelicht flittin

A graduation and a surprise

from

PART IV

: In Marrakech (Narratives of Desire)

In the Djemma el Fna

A debate on karma

Interlude in Essaouira

from

PART V

: Bringing It All Back Home

The wanderer returns

A Parting Song

The return of the Heretical Buddha

FROM

INTO YOU

(2001)

Vow

A Shuttered Lantern

Lucky

Tales of the Flood

D, Swimming

Ripe

A Night Rose

A Woman in Fife

Into You

That Summer

In the Frozen Nursery

A Pre-Breakfast Rant

Their Last Bow

Glider

Norman’s Goodnight

Scotland

Stromness Evening

Above North Ronaldsay

Papay

Last Walk in Tayinloan, Kintyre

Orkney /This Life

NEW POEMS

(2006)

Walking the Dog round Stromness

Best Thing a Dream

The Embroidered Curtain

The Natural Order

A Game of Marbles /Gemme o toolies

Park Mill

In Endcliffe Park

A Long Shot

The Edinburgh Coliseum

From the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh

A Resurrection of a Kind

From the Shelter Hut

From the Mother of All Parties

A Simple Evening

From a Marriage Bed

This Pilgrimage

About the Author

Copyright

FROM WHITE BOATS

(1973)

Night Shift

We start under the pale stare

of Evening Star,

patron of hunters and stealers.

Clothed soon by night,

we go about our daily business.

Small hesitations under the continuous stars,

snap, ripple, cry, mark the progress

of our fellow workers, weasel, stoat, owl.

And us? Five guilty things

circling under Tilley lamp;

clack of oars, boot on stone,

thud of killing-stick records night’s tally.

At first light we hurry away,

silver treasure swinging from light fingers.

Return of Venture

An indifferent moon

slides across the freezing harbour,

coining silver; the pier

crooks its index finger in moonwater

and scrawls a zany receipt

as Venture slips in. She too

trades in silver.

The men unload in silence,

they need heat then sleep. They

swing away towards town lights;

their cash will tintinnabulate

in bars, as they trade

silver for gold.

Whisky is good; they splay

knuckly fingers and make

huge boasts, as warmth and laughter

loosen hand and eye.

Outside, the moon mines silver

on an indifferent sea;

there are other boats, other men,

and a canny price will be paid.

Maxwell

5 ft 2 ins, with the bird of paradox

on his shoulder,

Maxwell is liberated. He locks

mutant gums under mucus scarf,

and boats over in old crow coat

to ask for 5p. (Cup of tea.)

His hands finger endlessly,

explaining his politics to the dumb.

Dissolved now by dusk and lighter-fuel,

he carries night under his coat,

spreads newsprint over it

and shuts out sight, or floats

into evening dreams of

shaving     finding £5    picking locks –

the new Maxwell emerges with clean socks

(and ears), to claim his life-style

with his peers:

drinking     ranting     fechting –

blundering to those enchanted scenes

of nice-nasty forbidden lecheries,

in hasty drunkenness, or in his dreams.

                      totally away

the moon mines silver

in the broken alleys,

and on chimneys, slates, and skylights,

beats. A snell sea-wind whines

in shadowed building sites,

and sighs up empty streets;

honing tears in the bones

of night-walkers, quick and dead,

fluttering the News over Maxwell’s head.

City and country sleep; only

weasel, owl, lover, do not rest.

The night turns over without effort,

without interest.

After the Affair

You wake when a thrush

clears away the half-awake dawn

you yourself half-alive

and not wishing change either way

and momentarily see

the beauty inherent in all things

loneliness singing in you like rain

does this morning return

those hopes     hands    eyes

that later proved

untrustworthy?

and yet at this

bitterest awakening

the fierce exaltation    the relief

Dido

I am on fire

and drifting

your smallest gesture

blazes me

your coming

breaks me

your voice is a cup

of sadness deep

then drink me

I am full of forgetfulness

your will

is none of your own

now all earth creatures

pluck the flower of sleep

woods and wild seas

are silent

sleepless love

burns my palms

love

the name

howled by night

at city crossroads

Evening Sketch

When darkness collects along hedges and under hills

Niall rises crouching from the long yellow reeds,

trout in his damp tweeds and his rod dismantled.

Over the loch the late geese strain west,

in last light flame like tongues in the air.

The country bus ricochets from village to village

to the harbour where his cousin’s boat, the Mary Page,

enters with gladness, splutters, is silent.

The two men push into the Clachaig on the way home

while wives draws curtains against the unknown

which limps away like a stray dog in its own darkness,

fed here only by daft Miss Jean

or begging round the byre of Willie Thompson, native poet,

eyes like whisky as he stares into the fire.

FROM MEN ON ICE

(1977)

Being the story of 3 Climbers and…another

Dedicated to Dougal Haston, Climber.

Captain Zen?

‘But what is this to camel drivers smoking hashish?’

This is the truth of it:

bunched together on crumbling handholds

under a crazy overhang, the wind

screaming personal demons,

the snow outrageous, night setting in.

Worn down by a