Incident by Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on November 14, 1910. Though he began his career with two books associated with the surrealist-inflected New Apocalypse movement, MacCaig’s work is primarily known for its lucid, spare style; he even went so far as to later dismiss his first collections as obscure and meaningless. MacCaig’s third book, Riding Lights (1955), is thought to be his breakthrough, the volume in which he pioneered the direct, plainspoken style for which he… (more)

Norman MacCaig was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on November 14, 1910. Though he began his career with two books associated with the surrealist-inflected New Apocalypse movement, MacCaig’s work is primarily known for its lucid, spare style; he even went so far as to later dismiss his first collections as obscure and meaningless. MacCaig’s third book, Riding Lights (1955), is thought to be his breakthrough, the volume in which he pioneered the direct, plainspoken style for which he became famous. In his books of the 1960s, including Measures (1966), Rings on a Tree (1969), and A Man in my Position (1969), he moved away from the metrical strictness that had characterized his early work, developing, according to Angus Calder, his “throwaway-seeming free verse” style. His later work, including A World of Difference (1983) and Voice Over (1988), shifted from “literary-philosophical description of landscape,” in the words of The Times, to deeper, more metaphysical themes. Simon Rae, reviewing Voice Over in the Times Literary Supplement, noted that “MacCaig hasn’t turned his back on the physical world, but he has, it seems, moved—easily and naturally—away from the excitements of the incidental to a more fixed contemplation of the elemental and the immemorial.” Three editions of MacCaig’s Collected Poems have been published, including The Poems of Norman MacCaig (2005), which was edited by his son and includes previously unpublished work. (Source)

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