I’ve just finished reading At the Loch of the Green Corrie by Andrew Greig, and much of the book is a tribute from a young poet to an older poet, Norman MacCaig (1910-1996). MacCaig loved to talk, drink whiskey, smoke, joke, fish, laugh, and be with friends. Greig praises the simplicity, directness, and intensity of MacCaig’s poems, particularly those he wrote as he grew older and entered his “late style.” I share that praise. Greig includes just a few of MacCaig’s poems in the book, hoping, I’m sure, to send you off in search of others.

I liked particularly Between Mountain and Sea, a short poem inspired by Assynt, the wild mountainous South West Sutherland, that MacCaig loved. He must have been thinking of Philip Larkin’s poem Days with its line “Where can we live but days.” I like especially the powerful last two lines of MacCaig’s poem: “the salt of absence/the honey of memory.” Exactly, but, I reflected, it could possibly be the other way round.

Between Mountain and Sea

Honey and salt – land smell and sea smell,
as in the long ago, as in forever.

The days pick me up and carry me off,
half-child, half-prisoner,

on their journey that I’ll share
for a while.

They wound and they bless me
with strange gifts:

the salt of absence,
the honey of memory.

Another poem that Greig includes is one of the very last poems that MacCaig wrote. He read it an event that was the last time that many people saw him. Greig remembers what he said before he read the poem.

“When I am dead – which will be quite soon – I shall probably be known as “the frog poet”.’ (Pause, laughter) ‘They say I write a lot of poems about frogs.’ (Pause) ‘I do. I like them.’ (Pause) ‘This is a poem about a frog.”

MacCaig pokes fun at himself, croaking like a frog and referring to the “stealthy heron” that everybody though he resembled.

My last word on frogs

People have said to me, You seem to like frogs.
They keep jumping into your poems.

I do. I love the way they sit,
compact as a cat and as indifferent
to everything but style, like a lady remembering
to keep her knees together. And I love
the elegant way they jump and
the inelegant way they land.
So human.

I feel so close to them
I must be froggish myself.
I look in the mirror expecting to see
a fairytale Prince.

But no. It’s just sprawling me,
croaking away
and swivelling my eyes around
for the stealthy heron and his stabbing beak.