Into the Blue Wavelengths
Into the Blue Wavelengths
About this book:
Perhaps all poems are love poems and elegies as well. From its opening poem on the poet's infant daughter to the closing verses on the death of his father, Into the Blue Wavelengths offers an exploration of this theme that is witty and serious by turns.
There are elegies in celebration of Hugh MacDiarmid, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch and Norman MacCaig (all known to the author), and there are privat poems which draw on the leavings of the modern world - snapshots, postcards, flotsam on a beach on Skye, recorded music, FM broadcasting, lightwaves and radio echoes - to meditate on the traces we leave behind us, on mortality, experience and memory.
Reviews:
Roderick Watson is a poet of introspection and retrospection. In the rich distillation of his language, the images of a remembered picnic, a Tuscan encounter, an out-of-date postcard, a holiday cottage - all these assume an iconic intensity in the quiet deliberation of this verse. Roderick Watson is a poet who ponders rather than postures. Each one of these poems, in his accomplished Scots as well as in English, is a pleasure to read, to re-read and to remember. Philip Hobsbaum