Alastair Reid was born in Whithorn but has travelled widely and lived at different times in the States, France, Spain, Greece and Latin America. He has published translations of Latin American writers, poetry, collections of prose and books for children.
To give you a taste of his work, here is one of my favourites, ‘Scotland’. As is the case with a number of his poems, it reveals a dry sense of humour.
“It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the women from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it’”
‘Weathering’. Alastair Reid. Publisher E.P. Dutton, New York. ISBN 0-525-23076-9
- Catriona