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 The death of the poet George
Bruce, peacefully at home in late July, sees the end of a quite
remarkable era in Scottish Letters beckon. Bruce was one of the last of
those impressive writers linked to the 20th Century literary revival
spearheaded from the 1920s onwards by Hugh MacDiarmid (Dr C M Grieve).
It is perhaps fitting that Bruce’s good friend Maurice Lindsay, who is
now the last living link with that period, should have contributed a
fine tribute to The Herald the day following Bruce’s death, in
which he wrote of him as "a poet of place
against which the hero is the ordinary man going about his business on
land or on sea".
George Bruce was born into a long
established family of Fraserburgh fish-curers in the spring of 1909. It
was an awareness of this inheritance, imbued from the fishing ports of
the rugged Buchan coast, that were the essence of his first collection
Sea Talk (1944).
A graduate of Aberdeen University,
George Bruce taught English for a decade or so before embarking on a
career as a BBC Radio Producer and Presenter, first in Aberdeen and then
in Edinburgh. He was responsible, along with Maurice Lindsay, for
Scottish -Arts and
Letters and later on for Arts Review during what may well be
thought of as a golden age in radio broadcasting.
His first Collected
Poems (1970) appeared in the same year as his retiral from the
BBC, which then heralded an amazing productivity and variety of work
over the next three decades. The highlights were Perspectives
(1987), Pursuit
(1999) and finally
Today Tomorrow: The
Collected Poems of
George Bruce 1933-2000
(2001).
Although George Bruce
wrote the bulk of his work in English, it was with an individual voice
of often clashing consonants, reflecting a sparing, economical use of
language that was uniquely of Scotland’s North-east.
Neil R MacCallum |
