A description of the first edition

220x145mm, hardback, reddish-brown cover with black print, 62pp

p.1, half-title

p.2,

By the same Author
*
RIDING LIGHTS

THE SINAI SORT
Poems by
NORMAN MACCAIG
1957
THE HOGARTH PRESS
LONDON

p.4, Colophon

pp.5-6, Contents ( all titles given in caps against page number)

pp.7-62, poems

The volume lacks acknowledgements regarding poems previously printed elsewhere, or any commentary by way of preface, afterword or even cover 'blurb'. Each poem begins on a new page. The book contains 44 poems, all printed on one or two pages.

Of these 44 poems in the collection, MacCaig chose to include only 5 in Old Maps and New: Selected Poems (1978), while even the Collected Poems (1990) reprints only 28 of them - although MacCaig then chose to include 10 previously uncollected poems written around the same time as those included in The Sinai Sort. MacCaig certainly omits some of the weaker poems, but the claims of stronger pieces are also ignored, such as the opening poem 'The Man in the Seed'; 'Descending Word' has some very fine lines; the opening stanza of 'A Glass of Summer' is a wonderful description of a summer Highland scene, and so on.

© Ken Cockburn 2002

Norman MacCaig
The Sinai Sort