Alexander Hutchison, poet and translator in Scots and English, was born in 1943 in Buckie in the north-east of Scotland, and has worked mostly as a University teacher - including 18 years in Canada and the USA. He currently lives in Glasgow. His poems, including the underground perennial ‘Mr Scales Walks His Dog', began to appear in magazines in the early 1970s. His first collection, Deep-Tap Tree (University of Massachusetts Press (1978), is still in print. In response to that early collection, Richard Ellmann said Hutchison's work was "compounded wit and mystery" and that still seems an adequate introduction - though the range of poems is very broad, and recent commentators have underlined his warmth and humour as well as his lyric grace.

The Moon Calf was published by Galliard in 1990, and Epitaph for a Butcher (1997) and Sparks in the Dark (2002) both by Akros Publications. More recent books are Carbon Atom (Link-light, 2006) and Scales Dog: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2007). The poet's website includes an extended interview with Andrew Duncan (from Don't Start Me Talking: interviews with contemporary poets – Salt, 2007).

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Featured poem

Fleurs-De-Lys

Sullen girls like lilies,
see them: sulkily listening
to music. Does duty put that
look upon them of languid
disinterest, lids downcast?
It may be duty (sitting where
they do), but beauty marks
them: pale and perfect, lily
flowers. Round and above them,
a cappella, voices winding.
Sullen, lovely, eyes averted,
devotees of a pure disdain.

© Alexander Hutchison