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Here are some brief thoughts on the pieces included on this site. Unless otherwise indicated, they're my personal reaction to the poems, and have no literary respectability whatsoever. The notes are organised by poem: you can link from poem to notes and back again, though I don't recommend reading them until you're familiar with the poems themselves – poetry's no fun if someone's telling you what to look for.
On the Further criticism page there are also some remarks about MacCaig's poetry in general, which the selection here (with any luck) illustrates.
Almost a song: there's a dreamlike quality to the metre which belies the balancing act going on. MacCaig, effectively at the start of his poetic journey, demonstrating the secret of his poems: remember vividly and don't be sentimental.
It's the density of imagery that makes this one. Notice especially the use of unexpected verbs, and the concealed surprise at the end — the narrator has, implicitly, wandered right outside the world.
I think what makes this for me is how it brings out the difference between being affectionate and being sentimental in poetry – the first is difficult, the second would be fatal here.
It's impossible to tell just how seriously the poet takes the philosophical jargon he's playing about with here, but the tone as well as the subject of the poem suggest, not very... Even when he's taking the piss, though, his descriptions are spot on &0151; look at a goat's eyes some time.
This poem's all about movement — listen to the way the third line follows the cow's weight rolling down, or the way "the collie trots" moves in double tempo, like the dog's feet padding beside the cows. (For all that it grates a bit on modern ears, the last image isn't meant to carry racial overtones: it's the world of the children's story-books the poet grew up on.)
The poet said once that he was afraid of being remembered as the man who only wrote about frogs – but when you can have so much fun with the subject, why worry? "I am a happy man", MacCaig once claimed, "and most of my poems are about praising things". Right.
By contrast, the point here is the central, savage irony. The poem, with its sarcastic turns and its bitter twist on gospel metaphors, is a vivid counter-attack on hypocritical Christianity. It's clearly a poem which needed to be written — but to what extent has the poet himself dehumanised his subject?
A poem built around a single conceit — but it jigsaws together so neatly, you almost don't notice (there's at least three senses of the phrase "Debatable Lands" running at once here). The use of line breaks is especially good: notice the pause in "falling / of roof-trees" which reproduces the moment as the girder topples from the vertical.
A memorial piece, not so much for a relative as for the Gaelic culture of the Western Isles. Notice how the issue of language — uncomprehended question and necessary answer — frames the poem.
Frogs again! Very simple: a poet's snapshot of the landscape he loves. The MacCaig talent for unexpected (but perfect) images ("jocular water", "cantering crumbs") used to underline the miracles of what is, after all, just an ordinary day.
MacCaig's poetry is never political in the sense of parties and manifestos: nevertheless, A man in Assynt, his longest poem, is a deeply political piece of writing, as this extract shows. Assynt, like so much of the Highlands, is still haunted by the damage done in the Clearances and by unconcerned absentee landlords. At the same time, as the poet say, he is in love with it. Listen for the relish of the word-sounds in passages like the first stanza, and for the effect of shifting the question mark from the end to the middle of the last one.
If you judged them only by their poetry, the friendship between the laconic MacCaig and the often blathering Hugh MacDiarmid (who doesn't seem to have been capable of thinking in blocks of poetry less than forty lines long) would be one of the great mysteries of Scottish literature. What they had in common was a love of whisky, tobacco and argument and a profound contempt of cant. Tongue-in-cheek this poem may be, but MacCaig, as ever, is making an important claim behind it on behalf of the prophets and MacDiarmids of this world.
Nothing points up the difference between MacDiarmid and MacCaig as vividly as this self-deprecating little number. The humour in much of MacCaig's writing comes from realising just how readily life outmanouevres expectation and deflates the sermon before it starts.
And some people think free verse means you don't have to worry about the rhythm of the lines... Reads as if it's just been jotted down in a pocket notebook, but even the halts and buts mimic the movement of the bird. Fun.
The main effects of this poem are visual, playing with the lines and colours of Japanese paintings, but notice the movement suggested by the use of dashes and alliteration.
Another series of vivid sketches, with clever movement (check out the effect of the questioning lilt after "flight") and a startling – but perfect – final image. Music's a recurring theme in MacCaig's poems: here it opens another level of metaphor behind the poem.
This is one of a series of poems Norman MacCaig wrote after the death of his friend Angus MacLeod. The refusal to accept easy comforts is typical MacCaig: death must be met on the dead's terms, and no-one else's.
So vivid and tongue-in-cheek in its treatment of philosophy that on the first reading, you hardly notice the point under the wry images (but consider the title).
One of the later, but by no means the last, poems on the subject. Against the dark poems of The Equal Skies, the carbuncle image is especially fitting.
A moment of grace (in the MacCaig sense) in a bleak book. It's the sheer economy of both the conceit and the poem that I love: they seem to me to capture that sense that the heart's almost too full for words.
A familiar sensation to all us ex-pats, I guess. It's interesting to compare this with Crossing the Border: same scenario; same basic metaphor; different perspective. Note also the use of repetition and echoes.