Sun Behind the Castle
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About the Book:
The Edinburgh of Angus Calder's poems is not the city of summer tourism and landmark buildings. It is the all-the-year-round arena of lingering mists or brilliant sunlight on grey stone, where seagulls and pigeons command the early-morning streets, curlers sweep their ice at Murrayfield and coarse sportsmen revel on the Meadows.
Reviews:
These poems could not have been written anywhere but Edinburgh. This, the most beautiful, wry, challenging and haunting city in the British isles, with its "classic grey - most delicious of lourdness, an ecstasy of glum" is the true hero/heroine of the pages that follow. These poems have the confidence and lightness of words at home in their own streets. In the modern city, Calder displays his customary sharp, vivid observation and notes of pity, kindness and melancholy you don't find, for instance, in MacDiarmid. This is a lovely book. If only every city in this land had a poet like him, what a richer country it would seem. ANDREW MARR
About the Author:
ANGUS CALDER has been best known as a social and cultural historian. The People’s War: Britain, 1939-45 has been almost continuously in print since it appeared in 1969. Other substantial historical books followed, and two collections of essays about Scotland, past and present. But he has also published verse all his life, won a Gregory Award in 1967, and was convenor of the Committee which helped Tessa Ransford realise her vision of a Scottish Poetry Library in 1984. Since he took early retirement from the Open University in Scotland in 1993, he has written poetry more prolifically, and published widely.
His three previous collections are Waking in Waikato (1997), Colours of Grief (2002) and Dipa’s Bowl (2004). Receipt of a Scottish Arts Council Writers Bursary in 2002 gave him gave him breathing space to organise his uncollected verse.