Andres Ehin. Photo: Roddy Simpson

To everything there is a season… and this winter, we mark the passing of three fine poets: Pearse Hutchinson (from Ireland), Andres Ehin (Estonia) and Wisława Szymborska (Poland). While digitising our large collection of photographs, many taken by the SPL’s longstanding friend Roddy Simpson, we came across lively images of Hutchinson and Ehin only recently. Szymborska is a powerful presence on our shelves, but regrettably never came to the SPL in person.

Andres Ehin died unexpectedly on 10 December, of complications following a viral infection. He came to the SPL in 2005 after spending a week on Shetland at an SPL/Literature Across Frontiers translation workshop, which I had the enormous pleasure of facilitating (SPL Director Robyn Marsack writes). His energy was as prodigious as his linguistic abilities; he was irrepressible! He knew obscure facts about many things – especially languages – and shared them with jovial assurance.

His poems ranged from four lines to four pages, from pure lyricism to a vibrant modernist impurity of shifting perspectives: very challenging but equally rewarding for his fellow poet/translators. He has been described as the ‘grand old man of Estonian poetry’, but he was not so old – 71 – and surely had poems still to write. All of us who worked with him on Shetland – and met him subsequently – have vivid and affectionate memories of him, and admiration for the poetry that outlives him.

Iain Crichton Smith, Jo Miller, Menna Elfyn and Pearse Hutchinson. Photo: Roddy Simpson

The Scottish poet Alexander Hutchison writes:

Pearse Hutchinson, poet, critic and broadcaster, died, aged 84, on 14 January in Dublin. Hutchinson, who has been described as a 'transnational' poet, because of his ability to move across boundaries – cultural, personal, political  – was born in Glasgow and taken to Ireland as a young child when his Scots-Irish parents, who had strong Republican sympathies, went back to settle there in the early 1930s.

Hutchinson moved around during the course of his life – to Switzerland, Spain, Catalonia, England, and back and forth to Ireland – and though this may have contributed to something 'outsiderish' in his circumstances and character, it also nurtured his deep love for and skill in the deployment of language, with a wonderful combination of fluidity and rootedness.

I encountered him first when he was invited to take part in an Edinburgh Festival reading organised by the Scottish Poetry Library – ‘Across the Sea of Manannán’ – featuring two other fine, Celtic, liminal poets, Iain Crichton Smith and Menna Elfyn. When I met Pearse off the plane, he cut a slightly odd figure, in a peaked, tweed bunnet and the kind of grey, plastic raincoat you can fold up and put in your pocket. He also asked straightaway for a beer, and I must confess I thought for a moment: ‘Uh oh’.

However, all that amounted to was a means of finding a congenial corner, and a quiet, assured, convivial conversation that was maintained throughout his visit. And when he read in St Cecilia's Hall with the others there was power, control and beautiful modulation in the voice – and in the poems themselves.

Mannanán, the Celtic god of the sea and storms over water, was a fitting tutelary spirit for that occasion; and his token plant, the hawthorn, a good one for the relations between Irish and Scots and neighbouring Celts. But in thinking of Pearse Hutchinson we ought to recall, too, the ‘unseen jasmine’ in his poem ‘Málaga’ – and the fragrance that remains of his Spanish and European connections, as well as his gift for friendship across the boundaries of words and the world.

Category: obituary