Poems that speak about the act of writing have always held a special attraction for me, and so “Letter to Heather: On the Line”, which explores what we mean by the poetic line and the drawn line, was a natural choice. The poem is addressed to Heather Spears, the Canadian poet and artist with whom Stephen Scobie has collaborated in Line by Line (Ekstasis, 2002), and shows his easy mastery of tone—by turns affectionate, serious, probing. In this meditation, the line, he tells us, “returns, always, to its starting point”, and this seems to share something of Heaney’s preoccupation with the verse—“Each verse returning like the plough turned round”—in his “Glanmore Sonnets”. At the outset of the “Letter to Heather”, Scobie alerts us to the ambivalence of the line, reminding us that “it is/a question of margins, marginality”, and later that “[I]t is a sign/(a lyin’sign) for limit and transgression”. This is a poem that raises important questions about the writer’s responsibility, and does so with enviable freedom and control of syntax, as he asserts
Just what that line might in reality be is made clear when he quotes from a Leonard Cohen poem (that became a Joe Cocker song), First we take Manhattan:
Such a line brings with it the haunting voices of the dispossessed, of immigrants everywhere, and when Scobie writes that “The line starts here” he reminds us that we are all responsible, now. In that pause, the poet turns to address his friend the artist, and the poem opens out into landscape in lines of great lyric beauty:

The tide is the model the poet will take for his own line, “…as slow as that, twice-daily pulse/or the breath-line pausing, reaching out/and coming home”. The poem ends in the presence of the “dear sweet familiar ghost/on the margin once again” who is there at the beginning of the poem. This poem was published in 2002, a year after the death of the poet’s wife.

“Western Landscapes” is a word/line acrostic from “Westron Wynd”, one of the earliest English love-poems, and I love the way Scobie has retained the passionate voice of the original, but transmuted it into a lament for all who have struggled against the unrelenting harshness of both land and climate in Western Canada, where
Look how Scobie picks up the archaic “thou” and runs with it, demonstrating his gift for strong, flexible syntax, his transformatory powers. Champions of social reform and minority rights of the peoples and nations of the west, in the face of eastern dominance, are woven into Scobie’s singing line. This is a poem to mine for echoes, allusions, musical underpinnings, and the desperate lover of the original is present not only in the acrostic, but there, subverted, in
This poem is a fine example of Scobie’s constant engagement with literature and history, and this engagement is likewise powerfully expressed in “I’ve seen some lonely history”, from Some Kind of Record, in which all the poems begin with an opening line, sometimes two lines, of poems by Leonard Cohen. This poem sees many of Scobie’s concerns united: history and justice, poetry, and his knowledge of popular song and of Paris. “I’ve seen some lonely history” celebrates the Canadian Jewish poet, Leonard Cohen and the French Jewish poet, Robert Desnos, one of the leading Surrealist poets of the nineteen-twenties, who was deported less than six months before the end of the Second World War to the Nazi camp at Terezin, where he died. It is worth quoting Scobie’s note on what the American novelist, Kay Boyle, records about the day of his funeral, when “the great and the humble of Paris knelt in the streets outside St Germain des Prés, the day of…the burying of the handful of bones that were left, in 1945, of all you were”. His name is recorded at the Deportation Memorial, at the very end of the Île Saint Louis, whose “bunkered gates” and “jagged iron on the divided river” Scobie paints in stark contrast to the cathedral when, as “the Christmas lights go on/organ music fills the rose”. The river may by “divided” in more ways than simply by the bulk of the island, just as France itself was divided and is still divided by the forces of tolerance and justice on one side and those of racism and anti-semitism on the other. That “lonely history” is there personified in the “old clochard with a bottle at his lips”, but Scobie also suggests that history is what we forget:
The names of the dead fall “like a shadow on the sundial of your life/ /—sur le cadran solaire de ta vie”, as Scobie addresses Desnos in Desnos’ own words; the dead poet stands as a kind of gnomon, reminding us of our debt to history, to register the dark side of life and who, as Scobie says, is still