Shore Poets
Mark Ogle was one of the earliest members of Shore Poets and one of the first to read at the group’s original venue, the Shore Gallery in Leith. A poet of great depth and sensitivity, his reading so impressed the founders that they invited him to become the third Shore Poet. He brought a stability, enthusiasm and commitment that helped catalyze and perpetuate the group after the Gallery closed and new venues needed to be sought.
Always closely involved in the running of the group, Mark played a considerable part in organizing the appearances of Norman MacCaig and Edwin Morgan at the 369 Gallery. Mark continued this level of involvement even once the group had been expanded and gave many memorable readings.
Mark’s untimely death in 1999, at the age of 50, left his considerable poetic talent under-realized. Some redress came with the publication of A Memory of Fields (Akros, 2000 ), edited by Stewart Conn and Hugh Dailly. More recently, his family has instituted the Mark Ogle Poetry Award, an annual commission offered by the Shore Poets organizing group.
When Mark Ogle showed me a selection of his poems spanning two decades I marvelled at their range of feeling and delicacy of perception, as at their musicality and technical finesse. What bemused me was not already knowing his work in print. According to his close friends he simply didn’t see publication as a priority. What mattered were the poem and its crafting, what he said and how well he said it.
I’d previously heard him read for Shore Poets, of whom almost since their inception he had been one of the most staunchly loyal (and self-effacing) members. His voice vibrant, he brought out his poems’ sinuous rhythms and rich sound patterns - with no hint of playing to his audience. Not that he needed to: the quality of his work spoke for itself.
A lover of nature and the wild, he evokes mountains and the comradeship of climbing them, and widely contrasting settings - nowhere more resonantly than in his adopted Scotland. Metric shifts and line-breaks subtly vary the tempo, while sustaining the poems’ assured stride. Time and again a last line mellifluously resolves what has gone before. In Wild Geese Feeding he is our observer, full of wistful cadences, every word poised and pulling its weight, to the flawless "necks stretched straight for the magnetic pole".
More intimate is a moving sequence in memory of his father, the sea a circumscribing presence; and touching the heart, several poems responding tenderly and with dignity to the death of a small son, aged just under two months. The sense of shared loss is all the more affecting for its simplicity - and eschewing of sentimentality.
Permeating his work are deep familial affection, an exhilaration with living and a wry humour. His final poems though, were written knowing his illness was terminal. While deeply saddening, they strike me as triumphant in their un-selfpitying manifestation of the human spirit. It is as though the prospect of what lay ahead, and the onslaught of pain, had crystallised rather than undermined the writer within him.
This in turn reveals surely the measure of Mark himself. The last haunting short pieces bear enduring and humbling witness not only to a strikingly gifted poet but to a man of rare sensitivity, humanity and clear-eyed courage.
A Memory of Fields
It was a matter of youth and air and climate,
Hands and instruments and fields combining
To create evenings of sweet exhaustion
When the last load was roped and ready to go in
While mist grew from the hedges and hollows
And fresh cut hay sap mingled with sweat on my skin.
The memory of fields contains lost arts and voices,
And sticks in my mind like mud to my boots
When I re-visit them in winter, or lie awake at night
And sniff the wind that smells of them.
There many hopes were broken and cast down
Along with wood and bones and worn out tools
To rest in nothing but packed darkness
And seed like perennial stars.
Setting a Candle
Only a steady hand can set a candle
To light a cold dark room,
With a deft twist of fingers,
Finding the still point swiftly and surely.
An unready hand trembles, falters,
Tries again, burns fingers
Coated with the tacky wax
And fails to find a steady light
Till peace and action melt
Into one flame, within my mind,
Before my eyes, the circling shadow
Wavering round the slender stem,
And the flame dips in salute to darkness,
And then swells suddenly to life again.
English Rain
I want today to close with English rain
Tapping on my window in the four o’clock gloom.
I want Wellington boots, damp coats in a hallway
And to fight from a warm room against a screaming seawind
To the poached, puddled gateways of fields
Where mud flanked cattle wait at winters end for hay.
I want trousers soaked to the thighs
From walking through long grass
In fine misty rain that doesn’t fall
But fastens glistening droplets to my clothes and skin
And to listen to the sucking sounds of meadows as they drain.
I want to come home early from work in the afternoon
Because of the rain and sit with a book by the fire
And hear the words, "Attention all shipping,"
And glimpse pale blue through broken cloud
And hear brown water running loud
Through the streets of the village
During a lull in a three day gale.
Today on this parched dusty plain
I want rain to start falling and not to stop
Until trees take such deep root they can only turn green,
As they begin to do in England now, thanks to the English rain.
Wild Geese Feeding
Wild geese at sunset follow their earthbound shadows,
Seeming like sheep or cattle to graze
Stooped over their unvarying food forever,
Yet able instantaneously all to rise
From the green table when the mood
Springs them from chains of appetite,
And they complete a painting of the sky,
Slipping low and fast in a ragged arrow
Honking through cold currents of air,
Over barely touched lands and seas
Knowing when and where and how to fly
Unerringly beyond the island’s canvas,
Beyond the contrivance of the compass,
Necks stretched straight for the magnetic pole.
