Iain Crichton Smith's lines - not only a salute to a distinguished Scottish writer but to a relationship of his own - were first published in Love Poems and Elegies (1972) and included in his New Collected Poems (Carcanet, revised and enlarged edition, 2011).
AT THE SCOTT EXHIBITION,
EDINBURGH FESTIVAL
1
He will outlast us, churning out his books,
advocate and historian, his
prose
earning him Abbotsford with its borrowed gates,
its cheap mementos from the land he made.
Walking the room together in this merciless
galaxy of manuscripts and
notes
I am exhausted by such energy.
I hold your hand for guidance. Over your brow
the green light falls from tall and narrow windows.
His style is ignorant of this
tenderness,
the vulnerable angle of your body
below the Raeburn with its steady gaze.
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