At the Canongate Wall

Kathleen Jamie on poetry in the public space

The Canongate Wall is a feature of the Scottish Parliament building in Holyrood, Edinburgh. Designed by Soraya Smithson and opened with the Parliament in 1999, the wall is in pre-cast concrete; its monumentality and sense of flowing movement has something of the glacier, or a new-built ship easing down the slipway. Set into it are bullish samples of natural rock from across Scotland. Behind the parliament rises the dolorite rampart of Salisbury crags. Stone meets stone.

At the foot of the wall are the grey slabs of the pavement, and then the security bollards that surround the Parliament and keep passers-by safe from the constant traffic.

There are niches in the wall: rhomboids, like skew-whiff windows; they speak to the building as originally designed by Enric Miralles, who died before the project was complete. And maybe also to tenement windows, or eccentric pages of a book. In turn, set in these niches are stone slabs carved with lines from the Psalms, and the occasional proverb, but mostly poetry.

Until a fortnight ago, there were 26 carved stones. On 11 June, however, there was a small unveiling ceremony for three new ones, inserted into vacant niches. The quotations they bore were by the three living former Scottish makars: Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay and me. We three were in attendance, as were Smithson, the stone carver Gillian Forbes and her apprentice Cameron Wallace. Although it was a strongly female team (the Parliament’s presiding officer, Alison Johnstone, did the honours), our three quotations brought the number of women’s quotes from one to four (out of 29). The only woman previously represented was the socialist and mill-worker Mary Brooksbank, with a verse from her ‘Jute Mill Song’:

Oh, dear me, the warld’s ill-divided,

Them that work the hardest are aye wi’ least provided,

But I maun bide contented, dark days or fine,

For there’s no much pleasure livin’ affen ten and nine.

After coffee and shortbread in Queensberry House, in a room often used to entertain international delegations, we filed out through the security gates onto the pavement, where one by one we unveiled our stones. (The quotations had been chosen by the public, in a vote organised by the Scottish Parliament. Three options each, approved by us, were suggested and the public were invited to choose between them. Five thousand people voted.)

First Liz Lochhead. She and the presiding officer peeled away a bit of sticky ribbon and a board to reveal a small slab of Ailsa Craig Marble:

this

our one small country ...

our one, wondrous, spinning, dear green place.

What shall we build of it, together

in this our one small time and space?

A few words into a microphone, some photos and Jackie Kay was next, a few metres down the street:

Where do you come from?

‘Here,’ I said, ‘Here. These parts.’

Then it was my turn. I sent photos to my children – both abroad – and thought about joking that I wouldn’t need a tombstone now, but I didn’t. It made me think of time passing. I wished my mother could have been there. I felt a rush of affection for those who were there, especially the poets, now we are in our third age. We have been in each other’s orbit for decades. When I began publishing, Liz Lochhead, now 77, was the only properly visible woman poet in Scotland, with her Glasgow glamour. (Very different from me. I took to writing partly because I didn’t have to be visible; the present ‘performance’ culture would have shrivelled me.) As for Jackie Kay, when she read out the lines now carved on the wall, I realised I had known them for ever, and could recite them along with her. The plain assertion of belonging, as a black person in Scotland, is now writ in stone on its parliament building.

My own line comes from a poem I published ten years ago, but the incident it relates happened long before that, in the 1980s. A further decade finds it carved on a wall: not any wall, but the feature wall of the building housing our devolved Parliament, which was itself but a dream back then, in the Eighties. We three modern makars were poets of the devolution years. Jackie Kay’s poem ‘In This Country’ appears in the 1994 pre-devolution anthology Dream State, edited by Danny O’Rourke. (The current makar, Pàdraig MacAoidh, was born in 1979.)

Many of the parliamentarians and staff we met that morning said they enjoyed walking past the wall. They said that reading the poetry and other quotations offered a micro-reset, away from the committee rooms and reports and debating chamber. I too like the wall; even without the poetry, the stones, which come from all the airts of Scotland, make a fine litany: Iona marble, Glen Tilt marble, Easdale slate, Lewisian gneiss. Polished up, the palette ranges through muted minty greens to ochre reds, through a flecked dirty ivory to February-sky grey.

But the stone suits the poetry. Or perhaps it’s the other way round. I think poetry suits stone, more than it suits paper, certainly more than it suits a screen. The poetry releases something latent in the stone. Wry bedrock wisdom. Much is down to the carver’s skill: the words can appear energetic or solemn, cleverly placed within the confines of the niche. And it’s tactile: the first thing I did on revealing ‘my’ stone was run my hand over its cool, smooth Dalbeattie granite. Some of the original quotations are already looking worn because so many passers-by have stroked them.

In the afternoon I walked down to Rose Street. In the 1950s and 1960s it had been the haunt of Edinburgh poets, or poets passing through. Hugh MacDiarmid. Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan. They are shown in the painting Poets’ Pub by Sandy Moffat, now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. It depicts a fantasy Rose Street poets’ gathering, a dream state of a sort. Sorley MacLean is also there, and Robert Garioch. All the eight poets are men. The only women appear in the background, young and anonymous. Two are bare-breasted. One is after Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, raising a red and yellow standard, somewhere between the lion rampant and the flag of the Spanish Republic. Another woman leans dreamily across a table, behind the men. One of the clothed women is leaning provocatively against a lamp-post; the other is in the arms of a man she’s kissing. The painting helps you understand how important a figure Liz Lochhead cut in the 1980s, against this older generation.

Rose Street still has plenty pubs, many with outside tables – something unthought of when the poets met. Back then they were real howffs and closed at 10 p.m. But I wanted to check on the planters, spaced along the now pedestrianised street. Each square metal planter, a metre tall or so, celebrates one of the Rose Street poets, if celebrates is the word. A poem is cut out on the sides in a tricky art nouveau kind of script: to read it you have to follow it round all four sides. They were in a sad state, forlorn and almost unreadable, crowded out by other street furniture. Two had been incorporated as corner-posts for a pub’s allotted pavement space. Planting was negligible. They hosted unhappy trees, and, dismayingly, plastic grass.

I stopped to photograph one. The poet’s name, George MacKay Brown, had all but rusted away. The barman was wiping down his tables. ‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ he said, which cheered me, but I replied: ‘Well, they were.’ Which I regret. I should have asked if he knew of these poets, their work. Brown’s poem was ‘The Hawk’, which begins: ‘On Sunday the hawk fell on Bigging/And a chicken screamed/Lost in its own little snowstorm.’ I don’t know who owns these planters, but they sorely need attention.

There are many 20th-century poets I’d have on the Canongate Wall, before we even start on the previous centuries, though some may have jibbed at it. Tom Leonard for one, with his sardonic ‘See the ballot boxes, glinting in the sun!’ There is the Makar’s Court, at the Lawnmarket, where in the yard outside the Writers’ Museum, pavement slabs have been carved with quotations from Robert Garioch, W.S. Graham, Violet Jacob and Nan Shepherd among others. But the Canongate Wall, at Holyrood, with those samples of stone from all across the country – it has a purpose, wreathing the Parliament with poetry.

That devolution happened at all is sometimes credited to the writers, poets and theatre-makers of the time. A lot of cultural confidence-building went on in the 1980s and 1990s, the Dream State days. I’d say devolution also occurred because of the arrival of women on the scene, the feminist movements, with female writers intimating to other women that they too had agency (74 per cent of Scots voted for devolution in 1997).

Few niches on the wall remain unfilled. The question is when to intervene again. We discussed this over our coffee and shortbread in Queensberry House. Five years? Or maybe the fiftieth anniversary of the Parliament, in 2049? Or even the hundredth anniversary, in an unimaginable 2099? I like the future-vision of that, the idea of leaving space for words by poets not yet born, who may be born not in Scotland at all, but on the other side of the world. We should save space for them, on our still-young democratic institution whose fate we can’t foretell. What will things be like in 2099, for poets, for the country, for everyone? I won’t be there, but my words might be and now, literally, on the pavement, I stand by them: ‘Be brave. By the weird-song in the dark you’ll find your way.’

(This piece first appeared in the London Review of Books)

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Kathleen Jamie will be teaching on the North Sea Poets autumn course ‘Writing With …’ starting 17th September.

Get all the details at northseapoets.com 🌊