Serial cyclical zeniths

The original Selected Poems of Joseph Macleod has sold out, so there is going to be a small reprint. I was thinking about a new edition.

  Possibly the edition can be improved. After 24 years, I think a rethink is possible. (NB I was doing the work in 2000 and 2001, although it didn’t get into print until 2009.) We know more now than we knew then.

  The reprints of the plays have duplicated some of the texts. And there are so many unpublished poems I left out. It seems a bit heartless to leave them out again. And, I found more than one new poem not among the typescripts.

  Overall, maybe we could remove twelve pages of (now) duplicated poems and inject ten pages of unfamiliar poems. They would be (I think) ‘Earthscape’ ‘Open Letter to the Countess of Sutherland’ ‘Tristia’ and ‘The last wolf’.

   However, Simon (Jenner) has advised me that the printer still has the production file of the 2009 edition, so that it is quite a lot cheaper if we reprint it unaltered. I think we could manage a 5% improvement, but I dislike the cost. The original version has reached quite a few people, and is still serviceable. Waterloo will put the resources into other Macleod books.

It seems shameless to leave the introduction unaltered. However, I think it always left most questions unanswered, and it hasn’t got worse in that sense. I can see that the introduction doesn’t even attempt an artistic evaluation of Macleod, but it is its fixed limits that make it able to stand up without being changed. There has been some very important work on Macleod since 2001, but it is reasonable to ask people to go and look for it. For example, we now have ‘Hidden sun’, James Fountain’s monograph on Macleod, and since you can’t summarise that it is sensible to ask people to go and read it.

  I assumed, in 2001, that because there were 200 Macleod poems in typescripts in the National Library of Scotland, they were all there. However, later information has made it clear that, where he published a poem, the typescript usually isn’t in that archive. He kept the printed versions. You have to know which magazine the poem was in in order to go and look for it. I saw a poem on 4 July, in the university library, which I had never seen before. (in Botteghe Oscure for 1957.)
The Macleod conference was on July 5th. Even after 26 years of fairly strong interest in Macleod, I was swept away by all the new information and new ideas. It is all happening. This means that anything I write now will become obsolete rather quickly.
I think we can say that Macleod was remarkably gifted, unusually prolific, and never saw most of that prolific work published. This combination may be unique, at least in its extent. I say this to excuse myself for not grasping more about Macleod at an earlier stage. This is also why the conference threw me into a torrent of new information and new ideas.