Stephen Scobie and I were students together at St Andrews, when he was in his fourth year, already a fluent poet, knowledgeable film-buff and expert on the music of Bob Dylan, and I was a bejantine, as first-year students were then called. A group of us used to meet in Tad’s Café to have lunch and play the juke-box. Our liking for the Kinks earned us the scornful jibe, from local high-school kids, of “has-been teenagers!” After Stephen went to Canada to do his doctorate, and then stayed to teach English literature in a Canadian University (he teaches at the University of Victoria), we lost touch. Years later, I had the bright idea of inviting him (he now had many poetry collections and prizes and other publications to his name) to come and read his work at StAnza [the Scottish poetry festival in St Andrews], which he did in 2004, giving an electrifying performance. His poetry is richly allusive, drawing on his wide and intimate knowledge of literature, music, art and history, to pursue his themes of sorrow and desire. He has been described as “the restless connoisseur of travel”, and he certainly knows Paris and its troubled literary history as well as anyone, and better than most. He is a poet’s poet, deeply satisfying to read closely, and his fierce, lyrical poems yield up more and more with each successive reading.

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posted on October 25, 2006 permalink | comments
cats: Features | Canada
tags: Anna Crowe | Canada-Scotland | Scotland-Canada | Stephen Scobie | contemporary poetry | poetry