Alastair Reid (poet)

Alastair Reid (22 March 1926 – 21 September 2014) was a Scottish poet and a scholar of South American literature. He was known for his light-hearted style of poems and for his translations of South American poets Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda.

Quotes

• ... St Andrews, that placid centre of non-learning.
  • "Borderlines", in Karl Miller (ed.), Memoirs of a Modern Scotland (1970)

• The Borders loom in my mind as a small archipelago of stony towns in a placid sea of grass, woods and furrows, small, bristling islands in a state of armed truce with one another, with their village satellites, their lumbering bus-ferries, their pugnacious localisms.
  • "Borderlines", in Karl Miller (ed.), Memoirs of a Modern Scotland (1970)

• I can remember coming bursting in from just having glimpsed eternity in a grain of sand and being told, curtly: 'Your tea's cold.' It may be that tea is the reality and glimpses of eternity only a temporary foolishness. If I ever thought so, it might be possible to give up resisting and to belong.
  • "Borderlines", in Karl Miller (ed.), Memoirs of a Modern Scotland (1970)

• It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet, when larks rose on long thin strings of singing and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
  • "Scotland", in Weathering (1978)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Alastair Reid (poet) on Wikipedia