Into the Blue Wavelengths

About the 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 private 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 In the rich distillation of his language, the images of a remembered picnic, a Tuscan encounter, an out-of-date postcard, a holiday cottage -all these assume an iconic intensity in the quiet deliberation of this verse.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

About the Author:

RODERICK WATSON was born and educated in Aberdeen. He graduated in 1965 and taught at the University of Victoria in Canada, before going to Cambridge to do research on the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid. His books include Hugh MacDiarmid, The Literature of Scotland, The Poetry of Scotland and (with Martin Gray) The Penguin Book of the Bicycle. He teaches at the University of Stirling where he specialises in Scottish literature and has written and lectured widely in this field. Roderick Watson was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Writer's Bursary and was one of the 'Heretics' performers in Edinburgh in the 1970s. Previous collections include Trio (New York, 1971) and True History on the Walls (Edinburgh, 1977) and his poetry has since appeared in numerous magazines and many anthologies. He has read his own work in Scotland and Europe and works with creative writing classes, schools and writers' groups. His other interests include cycling, motorcycling and modern jazz.