Ian Hamilton Finlay

This volume surveys the life and work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who is best known for his extraordinary garden, Little Sparta, a unique "poem of place" in which poetry, sculpture, and horticulture intersect. This book directs sustained attention to Finlay the verbal artist, revealing the full breadth and richness of his poetics. It illuminates the evolution from his early years of composing plays, stories, and lyrical poems to his discovery of Concrete poetry and his emergence as a key figure in the international avant-garde of the 1960s.

This volume surveys the life and work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who is best known for his extraordinary garden, Little Sparta, a unique "poem of place" in which poetry, sculpture, and horticulture intersect. This book directs sustained attention to Finlay the verbal artist, revealing the full breadth and richness of his poetics. It illuminates the evolution from his early years of composing plays, stories, and lyrical poems to his discovery of Concrete poetry and his emergence as a key figure in the international avant-garde of the 1960s.

Acknowledgments
Autobiographical Sketch
Introduction: Picking the Last Wild Flower

EARLY WRITINGS
Postcard from Glenlednoch
The Money
Walking through Seaweed

From The Dancers Inherit the Party:
The Dancers Inherit the Party
Angles of Stamps
O.H.M.S.
Love Poem
Ah, So That Is Why
Bedtime
Black Tomintoul
Gift
Frank the Bear Writes His Deb Friend
Orkney Interior
Optimist
Milk Bottles
Archie, the Lyrical Lamplighter
The Writer and Beauty
Finlay’s House (in Rousay)
The Chief Crop of Orkney
Bi-Lingual Poem
Island Moment
Castles
Jess
The Island Beasts Wait for the Boat
Two Variations on an Orkney Theme, with Notes
Orkney Lyrics
Twice
Spring Holiday
Catch
Art Student
Scene
Poet
End of a Holiday
The Tug

Glasgow Beasts, An a Burd
Voyage
Fishing from the Back of Rousay
Another Huge Poem for Hughie
Blossom Quarry, Rousay
How to Be Happy
Lucy’s Wee Brother
My Little Beat Mill in the West
Poem on My Poem on Her and the Horse
Such Is the World
Lucky
Midhope (All Gone)
Dalchonzie
The Pond of Oo (in Orkney)
No Thank You, I Can’t Come

LATER WRITINGS
Concrete, Fauve, Suprematist, Sequential, Kinetic and Optical Poems:
Detached Sentences on Concrete Poetry
Homage to Malevich
A Peach an Apple
Lullaby
Acrobats
Ring of Waves
Green Waters
First Suprematist Standing Poem
Cythera
Column Poem
3 Happenings
Little Calendar
Arcady
Purse-Net Boat
Net / planet
Seams
Net
3 Blue Lemons
Names of Barges
Point-to-Point
3 Norfolk Dishes
From ‘The Analects of Fishing News’
From ‘TA MYTIKA of Fishing News’
From ‘The Illuminations of Fishing News’
From ‘The Metamorphoses of Fishing News’
Headlines, Pondlines

One-Word Poems:
a bird of dawning
sea
a heart-shape
a spray, from a breton sea-hedge
a sea-saw
a water-lily pool
osiris
drip-dry
curfew
the boat’s blueprint
elegy for ‘whimbrel’ and petrel
the cloud’s anchor
an orchard of russets
a scotch daisy
hill
wave
a grey shore between day and night
a pinnate evergreen
a patch for a rip-tide
a keel with a tuck in it
a machine for fishing from
purse seine
a sepia wild flower
eec sea
channel light-vessel automatic

One-Line Poems and Monostich (I):
The ABC of Tea
Epicurus at Chatou
A Pittenweem Fancy
The Sea’s / Waves
Elegiac Inscription
Stem
Sea
Your Name

From Domestic Pensées
Steam Drifter
Evolution of the Boat
Magic Vessel
Sound Poem Kit
Elegy for A

From A Mast of Hankies:
Preparations
The Hanky Sails
The Harbour
The Old Nobby
The Stopped Sailboat
The End

So You Want to Be a Panzer Leader?
Fly Navy
After Gael Turnbull

Sundial Inscriptions:
The Four Seasons as Fishingboats
The Four Seasons in Sail
The Four Seasons as Fore-and-Afters
H)Our / Lady
Be in Time
Dividing the Light
Earth * Air * Fire
Umbra Solis
Sundial (After Paul Claudel)

From Detached Sentences on Gardening
From Detached Sentences on the Pebble
From Detached Sentences on Exile
Two Translations
Errata of Ovid
Ovidian Flowers
From Interpolations in Hegel
The Months
From Camouflage Sentences
A Dryad Discovered
Arbre (Tree)
Hitler’s Column
From Table Talk of Ian Hamilton Finlay
From Detached Sentences on Weather in the Manner of William Shenstone
Heroic Anagrams
Aphrodite
Detached Paragraphs on the Anagram
Anagrams: A Postscript
Idylls
Myosotis arvensis
Memory
Wildflower
Stiles I

One-Line Poems and Monostich (II):
Dove, Dead in its Snows
Poverty Pitted with Larks
Fax, Idling in its Sails
Monostich
An Eighteenth Century Line on a Lukewarm Hotwaterbottle
A Classic Monostich
A Line Struck from James Thomson’s Seasons
A Valentine
The Colours of the Vowels
A Question for Lovers

Posters (from The Little Spartan War)
Some (Short) Thoughts on Neo-classicism
And Even As She Fled (1)
And Even As She Fled (2)
It Is Not True
In the First Chapters
For the Best of the Jacobins
You Cannot Step
The French Revolution
From The Ivory Flute

Selected Dispatches of Louis Antoine Saint-Just:
Clay the Life
King
The Sound of Running Water Heard through Chinks in a Stone Dyke
His Bed a Meadow
Mystic
Sublime
The Revolution
1794
From ‘Clerihews for Liberals’
A Reflection on the French Revolution
Streiflichter
From Proverbs for Jacobins
From Detached Sentences on Friendship
The Inscriptions
From Flakes
From Spring Verses
Images from the Arcadian Dream Garden
Epitaph
The Brewster Buffaloes
From Glider Days
In the Manner of the Early Winters
From New Proverbs
From A Book of Wildflowers
Homage to Lorine Niedecker
Creels and Creels
Lines of Foam
Found Free-style Haiku
Oak / Bark / Boat
Line Light Lade
Adaptation
Variations
Expectation
Romanticizing
10 Sentences
Cinema-Going
Event
A Stone
Lemons without Bitterness
Boat
Boat Lore
A Last Word
Pledge (for Pia)
Frisson
Schlachtschiff
The End . . .

Notes
A Note on the Critical Heritage
Selected Bibliography
Credits