I won’t get there

Angus Martin first had his poetry published in magazines when he was still a teenager. He began his working life as a fisherman and ended it as a rural postman – fine professions for a poet. “I won’t get there” is from Martin’s latest collection West ( Kennedy and Boyd, £ 8.95) and is a stoical take on ageing and its affects.

A time is coming when I won’t get there when the west with its open skies and ocean will close at the back of infirmity leaving me only dregs of memory but I hold these gloomy thoughts in check as an animal exposed in time of threat might stand stock- still mistaking arrested motion for invisibility.

So, I refuse a track that narrows into a landscape of imagination soon to distort and darken with menacing figures and features half- seen and wholly unrecognisable impeding my way which, anyway, will conduct me towards a nowhere something the same as death.

You can find a copy of West by Angus Martin at the Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton’s Close, Edinburgh EH8 8DT. For poetry enquiries, e- mail reception@ spl. org. uk or visit www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk