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| Best
Scottish Poems 2004 Introduction |
The Poems | Acknowledgements
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The poems |
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| Seán Rafferty |
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Dear Hannah…Dear Hannah, Time no less than space From Poems, Revue Sketches and Fragments
(Buckfastleigh: etruscan, 2004) With just a little bit of help from my daughter-in-law Ann, Hannah arrived exactly fifty years to the day after I did. 'Dear Hannah' was as far as I know Seán Rafferty’s last poem, written in 1990 after the birth of his first (step) great grandchild in Sydney Australia, about as far away from deepest darkest central Devon as you can possibly go, discounting New Zealand. All first borns are of course heralded by portents and shooting stars, covens of good fairies rushing to endow health, wealth, Einsteinian intelligence, beauty and undiluted happiness, but few are lucky enough to have a sonnet to commemorate the event as well. It’s an amazingly literal poem when one comes to think about it, though in fact they did both manage to be born in the same century, if at the very farthest ends of it. The oceans though are all too real, and those whom he so dearly loved, (myself his daughter, & my husband John) do indeed love Hannah. The poem arrived in an ordinary blue foldover airmail letter, and I have found no working notes to chart its course, indeed it seems it was the manuscript. It came complete into the world, a final grace note, a flourish, a flick of wrist to show just how it can be done. Christian Coupe A neglected writer, most of whose work appeared after his death. This is just a lovely, almost perfect lyric, saved from soppiness by its slight mysteriousness. Hamish Whyte Seán Rafferty was born in Dumfriesshire in 1909. He studied Classics at Edinburgh University, and moved eventually to South Devon in 1948. He and his second wife ran a pub, The Duke of York, until 1975. He took over the garden on the estate of Farms for City Children in the same parish, Iddesleigh, until his death in 1993. His work was admired by Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean. His collections are Poems (1999), published in two editions by etruscan and Carcanet, and Poems, Revue Sketches and Fragments, published by etruscan in 2004. This was a posthumous assemblage made from his papers, a collaboration between Nicholas Johnson and Rafferty's daughter, Christian Coupe. |
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