W.S. Graham’s Dedications

Few poets left behind as diverse an archive as W.S. Graham. In addition to notebooks and manuscripts there are illuminated fair copies of poems in Graham’s calligraphic hand, hand-drawn postcards and watercolours. There are artists’ books full of collage and reworkings of found text and image, akin to Tom Phillips’s A Humument; there are artworks engraved into slate. In a private collection in St Ives there is even a signed whisky bottle. But, for the Graham aficionado at least, perhaps nothing is more emblematic of the man and poet than the verse dedications that he wrote in books he signed for friends. They include further snippets of poetic address, playful, affectionate, flirtatious – and in this way they read like an extension of Graham’s published work; poems like his love lyrics to his wife Nessie Dunsmuir; his elegies to painter friends like Bryan Wynter, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon; letter poems to editors and patrons: ‘Private Poem to Norman Macleod’, ‘How Are the Children Robin’. As in these poems, Graham’s dedications are endlessly fascinated by the workings of intimate address, caught between speech and writing, private and public. But the dedications also offer tantalising glimpses into his, and his poems’, social life: as informal gifts, testaments of friendship, but also as they contain hints into how Graham wanted his friends and acquaintances to read his poems.

It was fitting, therefore, that the editors of The Caught Habits of Language (2018), a volume which brought together previously unpublished verse by Graham with poems dedicated to him, ...