Alec Finlay has two new books out - here I am holding one of them, ready for borrowing at the National Poetry Library in London. Not Sealions but Lions by the Sea features condensed landscapes in the form of ‘place-name poems’, one of which uses a phrase I gave as a title to my book on cliffs: 'the first light greets / the frozen air' (Abergeldie - Brightmouth). These originally appeared in gathering: a place-aware guide to the Cairngorms - there is more information on the Hauser & Wirth website. I was interested to read some of the autobiographical poems in Sealions, including one about Sweeney's Bothy, an artist retreat on the Isle of Eigg which I described here in 2014. There is also a group of poems about Stonypath, the garden designed and maintained by Alec's parents Sue and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Here is one in which he remembers the lochan named in his honour.
LOCHAN ECK
I miss the skimming
swallows
over the dark lochan
the waters where I swam
eye-to-eye
with the blue dragonfly
Alec's other recent collection The Walkative Revolution, published by the Guillemot Press, is a book that takes on ableist attitudes to walking. It is a welcome change from reading about the arduous treks of certain nature writers, which can make even those of us without disabilities feel like we are missing out (see also my comments on the miles clocked up by Richard Long...) ME and long Covid have reduced Alec's ability to walk, but 'as a ‘not-walker’, the joys of toddling into the fringe of a wood, or along a short beach, are heartfelt and healing. Like so much writing, these texts attempt to heal the experience of exile.' There are poems about paths and proxy walks, a manifesto for minor walks and designs for walking sticks (including a fork-shaped one for Sweeney with the words TIME and TINE). One of the poems concludes 'a chapter of autobiography: Landscapes I Have Sat In' - which reminded me of the Tate's current Edward Burra exhibition, for reasons I'll explain in my next blog post. The book ends with a poem to celebrate the inaugural Day of Access (June 15, 2019), when four disabled people were driven up to an altitude of 720m.
The Walkative Revolution also describes a new form of 'disability poetics' that Alec has devised: the conspectus. This is explained on the Day of Access blog:
'Conspectus arose from a frustration that my disability, ME, prevented me walking over and through hilly landscapes. I loved to be in wild places, but my experience of them was bittersweet. ... I found myself, sat on a hillock, an OS map in my hand, knowing I couldn't walk any further, trying to find a new way to belong in the landscape. I began to identify the various summits that surrounded me, picking them out by name. Although I was experiencing distance, altitude, and inaccessibility, from a static viewpoint, I could feel an imaginative connection to the landscape.'
Thus arose a form of 'visual poem / composed from the names of hills / defining the view from a single location ... the conspectus is a place to gaze at the landscape; / a viewpoint where the terrain opens itself to the viewer; / where the eye threads in and out of the circle of hills; /where place-names suggest an ecological narrative.'
