MacDiarmid, one of various pseudonyms adopted by the prolific Scottish writer and editor Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978), wanted ``A poetry wilder than a heifer / You have to milk into a gourd.'' But the Scottish nationalist, Marxist and modernist also wanted more, as this collection of his work intelligently demonstrates. The collective impression of the poetry is challenging, thorny, didactic, disconcerting--an enigmatic wake left behind by a writer of many contradictions. Not all are welcoming. MacDiarmid wrote in two languages: a prose- like declarative mode broken into lines and stanzas, and his own almost impassable distillation and reformation of Scots idiom, filled with archaisms. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), considered his most important work and reprinted here in its entirety, is an example of the second, mingling erudition and viscerally physical language with a forbidding ambition; on the other hand, a poem like ``The Glass of Pure Water'' sounds a forthrightly discursive call to ``the Celt'' to ``overcome the whole world of wrong.'' MacDiarmid's work demands study, yet the rewards of a reader's effort may come slowly. (Sept.)
Scotland's great modernist poet (1892-1978) was a writer of enormous vitality and contradictions: an ardent Communist and Scots nationalist, philosophical materialist and metaphysical idealist, creator of earthily blunt Scots poetry and interminable poems of prosy, prolix pontification in English. The selection here includes too much dross in addition to the gold, but at least the Scots masterpiece ``A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle'' is printed in full. Some of MacDiarmid's more disciplined efforts are full of life and wit, but the passages from most of his long, later poems are, as he himself put it, ``but chopped-up prose.'' Skipping over dated paeans to Lenin and the proletariat, one finds much of value in the man who knew that ``He canna Scotland see what yet/ Canna see the Infinite,/ And Scotland in true scale to it.''-- Frank J. Lepkowski, Oakland Univ., Rochester, Mich.
Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978) created Hugh MacDiarmid in 1922. Shortly thereafter, MacDiarmid became the greatest Scots poet of the twentieth century, and at least while MacDiarmid was writing in Scots--the northern British variety of English, not Scottish Gaelic--Grieve kept secret that he was MacDiarmid. Eventually, MacDiarmid subsumed Grieve and pursued Grieve's passions--Scottish nationalism, Marxism, the Social Credit schemes of Major C. H. Douglas that Ezra Pound also swallowed, and the transcendence of the artistic imagination--for the rest of a long and distinguished but hardly profitable career. He was a man of great contradictions; for example, despite his Marxism, he admired Mussolini. In fact, he was a Nietzschean Marxist and from that clashing perspective wrote his great, fiercely satirical, keenly nationalist Scots poem, "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle," which (intentionally) recalls Eliot's "Waste Land" and Joyce's "Ulysses", is addressed in homage largely to Dostoyevsky, and is one of the culminating works of literary symbolism. It appears in this selection (MacDiarmid needs selection; he wrote some 2,000 pages of poetry, Eliot Weinberger imparts in his enthusiastic and exciting introduction), along with lovely, ambivalent lyrics in both Scots and English, satires, epigrams, and fragments of the vast philosophical poem he never completed. It is all without peer.
A selection from 50 years of work by the great Scottish poet (1892- 1978) who was both the author of an enormous body of poems in English and the man responsible for reviving Scots as a literary language. Includes the complete text of MacDiarmid's 1926 masterpiece, "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle." Edited by Alan Riach and Michael Grieve, with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. Published by New Directions, 80 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10011 Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
