He will outlast us, churning out his books, advocate and historian, his prose earning him Abbotsford with its borrowed gates, its cheap mementos from the land he made… —Iain Crichton Smith, “At the Scott Exhibition, Edinburgh Festival” DEER ON THE HIGH HILLS, @carcanet.bsky.social 2021

AT THE SCOTT EXHIBITION, EDINBURGH FESTIVAL Iain Crichton Smith He will outlast us, churning out his books, advocate and historian, his prose earning him Abbotsford with its borrowed gates, its cheap mementos from the land he made. Walking the room together in this merciless galaxy of manuscripts and notes I am exhausted by such energy. I hold your hand for guidance. Over your brow the green light falls from tall and narrow windows. His style is ignorant of this tenderness, the vulnerable angle of your body below the Raeburn with its steady gaze. It was all in his life, not in his books ‘Oh I am dying, take me home to Scotland where I can breathe though that breath were my last.’ He limped through an Edinburgh being made anew. He worked his way through debts, past a dead wife. My dear, we love each other in our weakness as he with white grave face diminishing through stroke after stroke down to the unpaid room. We know what we are but know not what we will be. I tremble in this factory of books. What love he must have lost to write so much.