30 August, 2009

I've finally managed to track down a copy of Stephen Scobie's poem, 'Dunino', from his 1989 publication. It's an elegy to his father, whose parish was Carnbee. Scobie barely knows Dunino - for him it's a sign of a passing-through place, 'a gap,/ a word placenaming open fields. The beauty of / it is / not.'
The poem has its fair share of set-piece paeans to the landscape, which feel too touristic and disconnected for me. Still, there are some sensitive passages, like this one:

We were not seafarers, we kept
our distances safe, while striding the decks
of ferries or Clyde paddle steamers
- the Waverley, the Jeanie Deans -
yet liked to have it always in sight, to catch
its far raw scent on an inland wind:
walkers along the shore, we traced
shifting equations of the pulsebeat tide.
My father is buried within sight of the sea.