Yesnaby
No trees at Yesnaby,
no whole rock either:
siege-guns of the centuries
have blasted their weather.
Here is a place
sheer for self-murder,
sliced away like losing face,
feet splashed away under.
Here is a place
for desperate lovers,
like lumps of cold swell
breaking over each other.
Here is a place
for fulmar and artist,
impassively pinioning
the blue loose canvas.
Here is a place
for the capsized ewe,
feet feeble against blackbacks
that cornwall° her eyes.
Here is a place
for the repulsed poet,
grinding his alliteratives
with a shaped pestle.
No trees at Yesnaby,
no whole rock either:
siege-guns of the centuries
have blasted their weather.
° cornwall - from the Duke of Cornwall in King Lear,
who puts out Gloucester's eyes.
In OAR 5 (Orkney Arts Review), 1994, ed. Alistair Peebles
Collected in These Islands We Sing:
An Anthology of Scottish Islands Poetry,
ed. Kevin MacNeil (Polygon, 2011)
Full Gale
by Ian MacInnes
Painter, teacher, political cartoonist and radical activist, Ian MacInnes was born in Stromness, Orkney, in 1922, and died there in 2003. He attended Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, 1939–41 and 1945–7, and went on to head the art department at Stromness Academy, before becoming the first art teacher in Scotland to be appointed headmaster of a secondary school, eventually retiring in 1984.
Ian MacInnes was a member of the 47 Group, which included Alberto Morrocco; and had numerous shows in Orkney, Aberdeen and Edinburgh, notably at the Torrance Gallery. He was a painter of seascape and townscape, and of Orkney folk such as his contemporary, the writer and poet George Mackay Brown, and the dialect poet Robert Rendall.
After his week's work in Stromness Academy, and after many a hilarious, hospitable Friday evening at Thistlebank hosted by his wife Jean and himself, Ian would regularly head to the cliff at Yesnaby on Saturday morning, painting his seascapes in all weathers.