Yellow Circle

About this poem

This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2022. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, including 5 poems in Scots 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 Scots editor in 2022 was W.N. Herbert.

Editor’s note:
Graham Fulton’s ‘Yellow Circle’ is ane o thae monologues frae someone ye’d really rather wisnae talkin to you but here you are. It exemplifies his capacity tae create somethin atween a short story and an image wi cinematic resonance in the maist economical wey. Here the speaker’s casual account of pointless petty theft, a sort o motiveless moronicity, is symbolised by him luggin the eponymous yellow circle through the bushes (Garioch’s Sisyphus comes briefly tae mind). The encounter wi the ‘fuckin wizard’ and his cat tells us baith aboot the addledness o the speaker and his misfirin attempts tae mak something like sense o things. It tells us we shidna be readin aa this symbolically even as, jist like him, we ken we canna help oorsels. We even ken that bein caucht in that vicious circle – I mean that ‘big yellow circle’ – is exactly whit this is symbolic o. Damn you, Fulton!

Author’s note:
It’s all true. I was outside with my neighbour’s cat sitting beside me when this shifty guy appeared out of the bushes behind us carrying a large, round, yellow package. The cat ran away. He hid it in the bushes and walked off trying to look casual. After he’d gone I went to have a look and rolled his package down the slope. I went inside my flat and waited for him to appear again. He came back a few minutes later and tried to find his package; it was really funny to see his sad wee face when it wasn’t there. I scribbled some ideas and realised that telling the story from the dodgy bloke’s point of view was the best way, combined with a mad Paisley dialect speech pattern and a scenario including the cat and me as a ‘wizard’ who helps him see the light. Nothing else.