I’ve been reading other peoples’ letters again. A weird notion made acceptable when the person is either famous or literary or dead, or a combination of those (in this case all three). This ‘Selected letters’ includes a publisher/writer correspondence in which the publisher says to the poet – “I wish I could report any movement from the booksellers, but they practically laugh in one’s face when one mentions poetry now.” Which sounds familiar but was actually written to Hamish Henderson in 1949, shortly after the publication of his Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (which won the Somerset Maughan Prize in 1949). No, I’m not going off on a moan about the difficulty of selling poetry – really, it’s just a done deal and I never bash my head against the same brick wall more than twice. I just move on and find another one. Our poetry sales are sufficient to make the exercise worthwhile financially – and, while we will do our damnedest for all our books, as we have a duty to do, there is no point in imagining that tiny TRP is going to radically change the book-buying habits of a nation.
I am studying Henderson, by the way, because we publish George Gunn who was a friend of Henderson’s and lies along that same energy-line of Scottish poetry – with an intimate, driving sense of its own history, place and political purpose. I’m talking broadly about people like MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, Mackay-Brown, Robert Alan Jamieson – though well aware that their bits of boolean algebra only intersect in places and maybe never all together. For someone like me coming into Scotland from outside – (my ‘country’, if I ever really had one, was surely the RAF which, like most countries, is not really a place but an idea) – these figures form a sort of mountain range which I had only glimpsed from sea level, and as individual peaks. The connectivity and the high passes between them are what I am learning now.
As the year takes off we have pretty well finalised the whole 2009 list, we’ve got the first six month’s books about ready to roll and, after another £800+ returns request from Waterstones (which is OK actually – they did sell over 1600 copies of our books last year) we feel we are becoming seasoned campaigners. There are less surprises, less numbing disappointments and more and more small, cumulative breakthroughs. Steady as she goes.
David
