Written by Stewart Conn
BBC Radio 4 Sunday 10th January at 1630, & Saturday 16thJanuary at 23.30
Written by Stewart Conn
BBC Radio 4 Sunday 10th January at 1630, & Saturday 16thJanuary at 23.30
Stewart Conn is one of Scotland’s most highly-regarded poets. He lives in Edinburgh and was from 2002 to 2005 the city’s inaugural Makar: the Scots name for a poet or bard. His Bloodaxe collections include The Breakfast Room (2011 SMIT Scottish Poetry Book of the Year) and a new & selected volume, The Touch of Time, while the new poems in this programme will appear in Against the Light, due from Mariscat Press in February.
…Was Raeburn’s skating parson
a man of God, poised
impeccably on the brink;
or his bland stare
no more than a decorous front?
If I could keep my cool
like that. Gazing straight ahead,
not at my feet. Giving
no sign of knowing
how deep the water, how thin the ice.