Selected Poetry

MacDiarmid, one of various pseudonyms adopted by the prolific Scottish writer and editor Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978), wanted ``A poetry wilder than a heifer / You have to milk into a gourd.'' But the Scottish nationalist, Marxist and modernist also wanted more, as this collection of his work intelligently demonstrates. The collective impression of the poetry is challenging, thorny, didactic, disconcerting--an enigmatic wake left behind by a writer of many contradictions. Not all are welcoming. MacDiarmid wrote in two languages: a prose- like declarative mode broken into lines and stanzas, and his own almost impassable distillation and reformation of Scots idiom, filled with archaisms. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), considered his most important work and reprinted here in its entirety, is an example of the second, mingling erudition and viscerally physical language with a forbidding ambition; on the other hand, a poem like ``The Glass of Pure Water'' sounds a forthrightly discursive call to ``the Celt'' to ``overcome the whole world of wrong.'' MacDiarmid's work demands study, yet the rewards of a reader's effort may come slowly. (Sept.)