
Best Scottish Poems 2007 Introduction \| The Poems \| Acknowledgements

The poems

Andrew Greig

Source

Author's note

Editor's comment

Biography

A Long Shot

As your lover on waking recounts her dreams,
unruly, striking, unfathomable as herself,
your attention wanders
to her moving lips, throat, those slim shoulders
draped in a shawl of light, and what's being christened here
is not what is said but who is saying it,
the overwhelming fact
she lives and breathes beside you another day.

Other folks' golf shots being even less interesting
than their dreams, I'll be brief:
as she spoke I thought of a putt yesterday at the 4th,
as many feet from the pin as I am years from my birth,
several more than I am from my death –
one stiff clip, it birled across the green,
curved up the rise, swung down the dip
like a miniature planet heading home,

and the strangest thing is not what's going to happen
but your dazed, incredulous knowing it will,
long before the ball reaches the cup then drops,
that it's turned out right after all,
like waking one morning to find yourself
unerringly in love with your wife.

Source

From This Life, This Life: Selected Poems 1970 - 2006 (Bloodaxe Books, 2007). Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Author's note

'A Long Shot' came from a discussion with my friend the poet John Glenday - who, like many Scots, had played some golf in his youth - about how there were so few real poems (as opposed to jokey verse) that involved golf. We challenged each other to write one. This is mine. I'm still waiting eagerly for John's. This last few years I have been increasingly preoccupied by love, mortality and golf: this poem is about all three. A few readers have taken the 'lover' and 'wife' to refer to different people, which would rather defeat the point of the poem, were it true.

Editor's comment

Andrew Greig has written some beautiful love poems and a best-selling paean to golf! Here he combines both passions with a delightful conceit - drifting from the loved one recounting a dream, to the memory of an unexpectedly perfect putt, and back again. The movement is seamless: even in the midst of recounting the golf memory, he gets metaphysical - measuring the distance he is from his birth and his death. Then with a single bound he's back to where he started, astonished at the absolute wonder of it all, that it's turned out right after all, and ending with a couplet that catches and celebrates the sheer perfection of the moment.

Biography

Andrew Greig was born in 1951 in Bannockburn, Scotland and grew up in Anstruther, Fife. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh and is a former Glasgow University and Edinburgh University Writing Fellow and Scottish Arts Council Scottish/Canadian Exchange Fellow. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1972, and his first book of poetry, White Boats (with Catherine Lucy Czwerkawska), was published in 1973.

It was followed by two collections that reflect his interest in mountaineering: Men on Ice (1977) and The Order of the Day (1990). In 1985 Greig published an account of the successful ascent of the Mustagh Tower, Summit Fever: The Story of an Armchair Climber on the 1984 Mustagh Tower Expedition, which was short listed for the Boardman Tasker Memorial Prize.

A second mountaineering book, Kingdoms of Experience: Everest, the Unclimbed Ridge, was published in 1986. His novels include Electric Brae (1992), shortlisted for the McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year; The Return of John McNab (1996); That Summer (2000), set in June 1940 on the eve of the Battle of Britain. His fifth novel, In Another Light (2004), won the 2004 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. Preferred Lies (2006), a non-fiction meditation on the nature of golf, Scotland and mortality, was shortlisted for the William Hill 2006 Sports Book of the Year Award.

A full-time writer, he lives with his wife the novelist Lesley Glaister in Orkney and Peebles.