on Malcolm Ritchie and Mark Ford

Time Travellers

The longest poem in Mountain on Top of a Mountain, a 111-page collection, consists of seven short lines. Most of the others are only two or three lines long, with five or six poems per page. All of them are titleless, grouped together in sections such as ‘On Writing’, ‘Earth / Mountains and Rocks’, ‘Seasons / Weather / Sky and Sea’ and ‘Human Condition’. The poems were written over a period of more than four decades, mostly while Malcolm Ritchie was living in Japan, the Isle of Arran and Cornwall. Throughout there is a sense of a lifetime’s pilgrimage.

In their imagistic and impressionistic brevity, the influence of Japanese forms is palpable, but as Ritchie explains in his introduction, the majority of his poems are not haiku, since the inspiration for them ‘came originally from my interest in the chants and prayers of indigenous peoples, and then later, graffiti on the walls of the various cities I either lived in or visited’. A feeling of freedom around the poems is created not only by the white space surrounding them on the page but also by the fact that they have arisen from wandering and living in different countries. Ritchie refers to them as ‘one-strike’ poems ‘sourced in my encounters with an object or event, when a poem might immediately and spontaneously arise’. In their sensory precision, sharpness of observation and sense of the miraculous in the everyday, they are reminiscent of the early poems of William Carlos Williams. At the same time the tones of melancholy and solitude, ...