The poetry of Norman MacCaig

 In my mind, Norman MacCaig is one of the great underappreciated poets of the 20^th century.

He was born in 1910 in Edinburgh, studied classics at university and became a primary school teacher. He died in 1997.

During World War II, he was a pacifist and was jailed for 93 days. He didn’t care for people who followed authority or custom blindly.

He was a great smoker. He would take a blank sheet of paper into a pub and would emerge with a poem. He said a short poem took one cigarette. A longer poem took two.

His collected poems include some wonderful poems about nature and about love. He also wrote one of the great dog poems in literature.

In “Praise of a collie,” the poet is grieving for the shepherd Polo’chan, who has taken his dog on her last stroll. The poem shows why this dog was loved.

            Once, gathering sheep on a showery day,

            I remarked how dry she was. Pollo’chan said, ‘Ah,

            It would take a very accurate drop to hit Lassie.’

It’s a fact of a certain kind of rich, full life: Some people appreciate and admire animals. A good dog can inspire people to tell tales about her, to tell how she sailed in a boat, how she was always the first across a burn and how “she flowed through fences like a piece of black wind.”

This poem is his masterpiece, I think.

• Source: Norman MacCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005.

The full text of “Praise of a collie” can be found here: https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2013%252F01%252F17.html