Four Directions

About this poem

This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2005. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2005 was Richard Price.

Editor’s comment:
An elegy for Gael Turnbull, with its suggestion of migrations, wildflower freshness and sorrow.

Author’s note: 
‘Four directions’ was inspired by and written for Gael Turnbull on the day I heard about his sudden death. I’ve been a fan of Gael’s poetry since the early 70s when I found his books in the London Poetry Library: A Trampoline: Poems 1952-1964 (1968) and Scantlings (1970). In recent years I’ve had the pleasure of his readings and performances which were always innovative and playful. His nature poems often reflect through repetition and rhythm what actually happens:

burning
the leaves

turning
over the earth

the earth
turning over

the leaves
returning

(from ‘Six Country Pieces’)

When I heard Gael had died I went down to my allotment to see what was happening in the natural world, and I read aloud his collection, A Gathering of Poems. Because of a wild rose bush nearby, I lingered over ‘Five/Four Time’, reading it over and over since the beginning is the end, the end the beginning:

bramble hedge roses

weave and unravel
wind and regather

loop and turn backwards
twist and curl inwards

scent of deep thickets
thick with rose brambles

tint of frail petals
pale on dark lattice

roses in tatters
scatter your blossoms

bramble hedge roses

The music is the language, the language is the music and the images float forever on the wind. I looked up and saw my garlic bolting and twisting like writing in the air. Being influenced by Far East traditions of imitating the masters, I took Gael’s poem and used it as a template for my own. All his lines have five syllables, all my lines have five syllables. We begin and end with the same line, the rest are short couplets playing with rhyme and alliteration. Gael has five couplets; I finished with four. In an earlier version, I had a fifth couplet: ‘garlic seed floating / gloating your words’, but decided it was too obvious. Less is more. The line: ‘for migrating birds’, is both a tribute to Gael’s pioneering Migrant Press, and an acknowledgement of his passing from this place to who knows where.

With such a clear structure to follow, my poem almost wrote itself. After the funeral in the cemetery behind the church, I read my poem then put it in his grave along with a biscuit his grand-daughter gave him – ‘He might be hungry where he’s going’.