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| Best
Scottish Poems 2008 Introduction |
The Poems | Acknowledgements
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The poems |
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| Robin
Fulton |
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Setting OutThe gravestones still weigh the same. No-one asks why I've come back that wedge in the river-bank at home had boulders on them. My years tugged at weight gave their atoms slowly back. Its ghosts set out at high tide. whose fluency the words trapped SourceFrom Grenzflug (Rugerup, 2008). With permission of the poet. Author's noteI can't "explain" the last few lines of the poem without using the words I've already used there, but I can describe the mundane background. In 1948 father moved us to Helmsdale in the east of Sutherland, where he came to serve as Church of Scotland minister for nearly thirty years. Telford's fine old bridge was then the only route across the river: at low tide I looked down and saw the stones on the bed, but at high tide the water swelled up, opaque and smooth and frightening. If you look up-river from the bridge you see the graveyard, embraced in a gentle curve of the river: both my parents are buried there as well as not a few people I once regarded as "old." Just down-river from the graveyard, in a groove cut into the bank, a rowing-boat had been drawn up, apparently abandoned. It lay there year after year after year, part of the landscape and looking as permanent as the gravestones. Eventually it began to decay and on one of my visits I saw that it had vanished. It had become a non-boat but in its absence still seemed present, still an immovable part of that landscape. At the same time I imagined the spirit of the boat to be free now: could move wherever it wanted on the face of the waters. Editors' commentAs we grow older the past becomes more elusive and more imperative. Perhaps this is why poets cannot resist returning to it, given its shifting nature. In 'Setting Out', Robin Fulton, who was born on Arran, appears to return to the island, which he may physically have left long ago but which he can never forget even if he was inclined. His poem is very personal but, like all good poems, it resonates beyond the personal, becoming universal, philosophical, poetic, beautiful. BiographyRobin Fulton has spent the first half of his life so far in Scotland and the second half in Norway, where he taught at Stavanger University. He is currently translating Swedish poems by Harry Martinson and Lennart Sjögren, and his most recent publication is a bilingual English-German selection of sixty-two poems. Related links |
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