Seal Song & Other Poems
‘Ian Spring’s poetry is wry and thoughtful, brimming with intelligent humanity-from the tenements of Glasgow to Scotland’s wild edges.’ ‘Hugh MacDiarmid wrote of “a certain Gothicity” which he favoured in poetry, and that is abundant in lan Spring’s first collection, which is hopefully not his last. We encounter such signs as a piece on Faust, a quotation from Baudelaire, Stevenson’s Jekyll imagined in the caverns and crevices of Edinburgh (surely the erring Doctor’s true locus, rather than London), ‘The Ballad of Pullars of Perth’ takes an unexpectedly macabre turn, and at a public hanging in Glasgow the chapmen are full of verse. Note the acid conclusion of ‘The People that Write for the Times’, and discover reasons for ‘The Impossibility of Sex in Glasgow’. The Caledonian Metropolis is the poet’s native city and it features in many of the poems. He has lived variously elsewhere, but like Prague for Kafka, it “does not let go…this little mother has claws”.’