![]() Seth's plainness can disarm, like Wordsworth's desire to pin down "The Thorn"'s "little muddy pond": "I've measured it from side to side:/'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide." Is this badness or an artless desire to say the thing right out? The thing, in Seth's case, is death, which pours ironically through the collection like rain from a cloudless sky. The staccato "Signpost at Midnight" wrestles with Beckett's dying falls: "However,/This one,/She was…/She was like one I loved,/If memory serves,/I am not sure…Maybe I'm wrong/And I have never loved/Perhaps so." Some inevitably feel like a writer struggling to hear his own voice. Although Banks apparently revised these poems until his premature death in 2013, most works are drawn from the 1970s. MacLeod shares this first collection, and is probably braced for his fluent, often politically motivated verse to lurk in the shadow of Banks' limelight. The occasional poem in obscure anthologies, a couple of lines inserted into Banks's weird and wonderful body of prose. But, as fellow science-fiction Scot Ken MacLeod notes in his introduction to Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod Poems (Little Brown, £12.99), the clues were there. ![]() Iain Banks is perhaps not the first novelist you associate with poetry. ![]()
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