
Best Scottish Poems 2004 Introduction \| The Poems \| Acknowledgements

The poems

Robin Fulton

Source

Author's note

Editor's comment

Biography

Reaching Helmsdale

If it weren’t for
this red tweed jacket
I bought in Brora
I might well wonder
if we’d ever gone
north of Inverness.

We shouldn’t need proof
but do, it not being
normal to crowd in
so many slow years
to three or four hours
cuffed by a sea-wind

and buffeted by
non-highland music
from the Highland Games
up on Castle Park
(now called Cowper Park
– no-one can say why).

We’d come a long way
to look at gravestones:
we could read father
was ‘devoted’ while
mother was ‘beloved’.
Weren’t both ‘beloved’?

Wandering I saw
Andrew Rutherford
had four doctorates
(honorary) chipped
on his stone. And Nan
MacLeod my once fierce

maths teacher, mother’s
best friend and bête noire,
had an out-of-place
middle name: Percy.
Her mother Lizzie
sat by a peat fire

trapped and arthritic.
Unmoving the stones
turn their backs on us.
Blind they look through us.
This brash easterly
from the Moray Firth

is not going to stop:
the longer it comes
to blow in my mind
the harder it will
tug at my coat-sleeves
my hair my eyelids.

Source

First published in island, 10, spring 2004.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Author's note

In 1948 my father began a three-decade stint as C. of S. Minister at Helmsdale on the east coast of Sutherland. I spent six years of school holidays and four of university vacations there: I felt isolated and frustrated and needed many years to shake off the effects. I still have nightmares about the harbour. In August 2002 I went there after an absence of seventeen years: I still had my private version of Helmsdale in my head but in the interval something had cleared up and I could now see the place as more or less normal.

Andrew Rutherford’s parents had had a shop in the village and he became a Professor of English in London. Lizzie (wife of Jimmy MacLeod the blacksmith) was related to my maternal grandfather, Murdo Macpherson. Nan (Agnes, or Ag) left a teaching post in Glasgow to be Head of Maths at Golspie. She combined kind-heartedness with a vigorous temperament: ex-pupils of the kind who had perhaps preferred to treat school nonchalantly would thank her afterwards for having bulldozed them through their Highers.

Robin Fulton

Editor's comment

Fulton is a poet I admire very much and feel is still underrated – is this because he lives in Norway? In a perhaps more conversational mode than usual this is still a typically tightly controlled syllabic piece, a meditation on past and present, how we can only read history and ask unanswerable questions.

Hamish Whyte

Biography

My father’s people were from the Borders and Edinburgh, my mother’s from Sutherland and Caithness. I attended primary school on Arran and in Glasgow, secondary school at Golspie in Sutherland, and took an MA and a PhD at Edinburgh University.

Between 1967 and 1976 I edited Lines Review and the associated books, and I held the Writers’ Fellowship at Edinburgh University from 1969 to 1971. Books of essays were published in 1974 and 1989. A Selected Poems in 1980 (o.p.) gathered work from five previous volumes and was followed by three other collections in 1982, 1990 and 2003. Poems published in a wide range of magazines remain uncollected. I have translated volumes of poems by Swedish, Norwegian and Danish writers, and have myself been translated into German, Spanish and Swedish.