Norman MacCaig was born in 1910 in Edinburgh, of a lowland father and a highland mother. Educated at the Royal High School and the University of Edinburgh, where he studied classics, he worked for many years as a primary school teacher.

A conscientious objector during the Second World War, his first two books were published in the 1940s, though he later disowned them. From Riding Lights in 1955 to Voice Over in 1988 he published fourteen collections of poetry.

He was appointed Fellow in Creative Writing at Edinburgh in 1967, and in 1970 he became a reader in poetry at the University of Stirling.

For most of his life, MacCaig divided his time between Edinburgh and Assynt in the north-west Highlands: the landscape of the latter in particular is a recurring theme of his poetry. He died in Edinburgh in January 1996.

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› www.jacobite.org.uk/maccaig/
The nearest thing to a 'normanmaccaig.com' though it's run unofficially by an individual enthusiast.

› webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/articles/degott/2_95.html
Essay on MacCaig by Anette Degott

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Edinburgh Courtyard in July

__Hot light is smeared as thick as paint
On these ramshackle tenements. Stones smell
__Of dust. Their hoisting into quaint
Crowsteps, corbels, carved with fool and saint,
Holds fathoms of heat, like water in a well.

__Cliff-dwellers have poked out from their
High cave-mouths brilliant rags on drying-lines;
__They hang still, dazzling in the glare,
And lead the eye up, ledge by ledge, to where
A chimney’s tilted helmet winks and shines.

__And water from a broken drain
Splashes a glassy hand out in the air
__That breaks in an unbraiding rain
And falls still fraying, to become a stain
That spreads by footsteps, ghosting everywhere.

Norman MacCaig
reprinted in Luckenbooth: An Anthology of Edinburgh Poetry (Polygon 2007), reproduced by permission of Polygon