Let us allow ourselves
to be inspired.
Let us demand roses
The Cafe
Gay ministers
It can afford to fund
a space programme. But
it is still worthy of our aid
Young Scotland
Katie Cunningham
and
Chloe Thomson
The Arab spring
is with us. But is
winter far behind?
John Cameron
It’s a gas
The football manager who
had ‘no comment’ to make
– even about the weather
Joyce Gunn Cairns
A portrait of A L Kennedy
Rear Window
Stewart Conn on the Greenock-born poet W S Graham (1918-86)
The first of my sporadic and brief contacts with him was asking him to go to his local BBC studio to record two poems. When I telephoned the office there to see if someone would look after a poet for me, there was a female shriek at the other end: ‘Not Mister Graham! The one who wants whisky with his boiled eggs, for breakfast!’.
The only time I heard him read in the flesh, he gave the impression of boiled eggs aplenty. Rocking slowly on his heels, he kept asking those in the audience who loved him to put their hands up. It was a strangely discomfiting gesture of insincerity in so handsome and ebullient a figure. He got through the evening. But a recording planned for afterwards had to be cancelled.
Introducing a selection of poems on radio later, he described one as ‘narrow on the page’, then invited listeners to envisage it surrounded by whiteness. In a sense this whiteness intimately linked yet isolated poet and listener from one another.
The way Graham put it in a Poetry Society bulletin has added application to the process of reading aloud on radio: ‘I am always very aware that my poem is not a telephone call. The poet only speaks one way. He hears nothing back. His words as he utters them are not conditioned by a real ear replying from the other side’.
SR Autumn 1999
The Twa Dugs of Dunure
Photograph by Islay McLeod
Gerard Rochford
Helga’s Hat
I knew it was you, seen even from behind,
entering the gallery. I was going to sketches
of nineteen-forties fashion –
you, in your hippy-indian-sixties bonnet,
to the Diane Arbus photographs upstairs.
This synchrony means nothing:
the forties, sixties, the now of you and me,
our guarded secrets. Only you would know
the meaning of the hat.
Arbus could have snapped us,
called it: ‘Old man – old hat.’
Yet here we are chatting about your friend,
my daughter, how we want her to study art,
thinking of the future, surrounded by the dust
artists have left to decorate our minds.
I say: Arbus killed herself.
Then I regret exposing the negative
in this echoing hall, where the fountain
gathers coins, and Epstein’s
‘Girl with Gardinias’ could be Eve
inviting us still to savour nakedness.
Helga climbs the staircase and I leave.
© Gerard Rochford.
Gerard lives in Aberdeen. His publications include: ‘Figures of Stone’, 2009, Koo Press and ‘Failing Light’, 2010, Embers Handpress. He is SR’s Makar and contributes a poem each month
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