POEM OF THE DAY

A HANDSOME little booklet, entitled Landway, has won the first prize of

£1,500 in the last Callum Macdonald Memorial Award for poetry pamphlets.

The award, run by the National Library of Scotland and also supported by the Michael Marks Charitable Trust and Lady Marks, is unusual among major poetry prizes in being given to the publisher, rather than the poet. Happily, Leonard Mcdermid, Landway’s publisher, is also the poet. Judges, looking for the winning combination of form and content, admired the chaste potency of word and image, and the sheer charm of the pamphlet. The poems are rooted in their settings but the quotes below give some impression of the “exquisite distillation” of the bucolic theme.

At this, the year’s turn. Look,

See the frail future.

Yet.

[then the grey silhouette of a castle] That castle: that rock

SUMMER INTO AUTUMN ROSE

BAY

WILLOW

HERB

LANDWAY

The old landway,

Silent.

A white moon casts the elms’ shadows Across the future years. SPRING OFFENSIVE Monday 1st April march past spring turning

Easter rising

INCH TO A MILE

See.

That stretch of land Between the crags.

Then the hill,

Where you walk the contours. A distant red dot.

And the world turning.

LATE SNOW

Dark hair, snow-flecked white, Wearing the long floral dress she loves,

A man’s jacket across her shoulder,

In the yard,

Pail to hand,

She feeds the hens.