Un Tour d’Ecosse (2001)
Un Tour d’Ecosse provides a vision of Scotland from the handlebars of the ecologically friendly machine which the French call ‘la petite reine’.
Here are poems of loss and desire, poems in Scots and English and poetry in English about Scots. There is an ode addressed to a poet by a cockroach; and a hippopotamus migrates from a New York hotel to the Venetian lagoon. Burns, Frank O’Hara, Apollinaire and Mel Gibson have parts to play; there are elegies for the film-maker Derek Jarman and the French writer Hervé Guibert as well as gay love poems. An extended sequence features a fantasy bicycle race around Scotland modelled on the Tour de France. From Sauchiehall Street to Carradale, Dunkeld to the Orkneys, here is Scotland as it has never been seen before.
Un Tour d’Ecosse deploys a variety of styles and voices and languages, suggesting provocative overlaps between areas of sexual, linguistic and national marginality and placing ‘crossover’ at the heart of Scottish cultural identity.
“His capacity for building larger structures out of individual poems (one of the most memorable aspects of Paris-Forfar) is undiminished: the unspoken barrier of 'Wall' is placed next to a prose-poem on 'The Thresholds of a Scottish Parliament '(“Within the door-stane smeddum of the thresholds of a Scottish Parliament the delicate hyphens pivot, rocking its peoples inwards, outwards to the translated melodies of Carmichael’s blessing”), leading on to a heartbreaking evocation of human solitude in 'The Barrier', echoed by the comic, loving entanglements of the wakeful and sleeping partners in 'Bed'. Such ramifications extend outward from the most straightforward-seeming of these poems, making this a collection whose coherence and pleasurable complexity increase with every reading.”
— Peter Manson (Object Permanence)
