THIS year's Callum Macdonald Memorial Award for poetry pamphlets, run by the National Library of Scotland, has been won by Mariscat Press with Prodigal, a sequence of poems on Scottish farming themes by Jim Carruth (£6).
The prize of £800 is for the publication as an entity. The writer of the winning pamphlet is invited to Harvard University's Centre for Hellenic Studies in Greece this summer as a poet in residence. Here is a sample from Prodigal.
SOMEBODY'S SON
Somebody's son set out through the dark
across the fields he'd worked for years
to find a winged messenger he'd heard fall.
This farmer armed just with a pitchfork
found an airman wrapped in a parachute
so walked his hobbling prisoner back home
where his mother was waiting in the kitchen
offering her visitor tea but he took only water
and would not sit down until asked to do so.
The stranger was a gentleman she recalled later
and she did not hold back on her hospitality
for after all he was somebody's son.
* Just after 11 pm on May 10, 1941, 45-year-old
ploughman David McLean met Rudolph Hess.
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