Photo courtesy Flora Selwyn and St Andrews in Focus
Younger daughter of Scots composer F G Scott, Lillias Forbes commenced writing verses at an early age, being by eleven years already influenced by contact with Scots verse as she heard it by way of her father’s settings. The family home was to become rendez-vous for a welter of aspiring artists – MacDiarmid, George Campbell Hay, W S Graham, Dylan Thomas, Edwin and Willa Muir: to name but a few. The late highly esteemed Duncan Glen found her poetic output to be “revealing a recognisable and individual voice”, while MacDiarmid considered her work “an utterance uncontaminated by merely literary fashions – all this amounts to is simply integrity.” Norman MacCaig also knew Lillias Forbes’ output, praising “her richness and variety of language and rhythms. And there is wit here, too.” Lillias says that she is a little taken aback at finding that her muse has not fled away entirely “at my advanced age.” I am delighted that this is the case, and honoured to make available to a wider public a selection of poems which conclusively prove it to be true. Colin Will |
Sample poem:
SOUTH STREET CAFÉ
Here, poised in time they sit
As actors en retrait
Braced, ready for curtain up
Impatient for the morning fix:
Waiters whip round, attentive,
Especially towards those ageing habitués
Charity-clad, comme il faut,
Hung in discreet draperies
Their "good taste' still in view, intact.
No blast of'musak' here
To quell stray early-morning eddies
Brushing tired brows,
Lifting dog's-ears of yesterday's lost news:
Within, the academic file, averse to talk,
Deaf to the ten-cup coffee grinder's snarl
Anticipates the innocent draught of smoothies -
Until, at last, spiralling out to the pavement
That steaming cup -that fragrance -
Stuff of dreams - that moment by the Pont Neuf -
Eyes sparkle, senses quicken, tongues loosen across tables
So nearly like the “Boul’ Miche" - so far away!
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