1Times Literary Supplement, April 29, 2005, p. 26.“Dreams of Weeds”Ian Hamilton Finlay, edited by Ken CockburnTHE DANCERS INHERIT THE PARTY.Early stories, plays and poems244 pp. Edinburgh: Polygon £9.991 904598 13 7In the decade before he became known as a concrete poet, a sculptor,a maker of verbal-visual objects, and the creator of the literally fantastic“garden” in Dunsyre in Lanarkshire known as Little Sparta, Ian HamiltonFinlay wrote short stories, plays, and even some conventionally rhyminglyric as well as the animal poems collected in Glasgow Beasts An A Burd,written in Glasgow dialect, with accompanying woodcuts inspired by theJapanese poet Shimpei Kusano. Thirteen of the twenty-one short stories,dating from the early 1950s and reprinted for the first time in this newedition of The Dancers Inherit the Party, appeared in newspapers andjournals, such as the Scottish Angler and the Glasgow Herald. Of the threeplays included, two are reprinted from New English Dramatists (1970), whilea third is published here for the first time. Ken Cockburn’s edition alsoincludes seven previously unpublished poems, but these are slight examplesof vers de circonstance and will not appreciably change our understanding ofFinlay’s remarkable concrete or one-word poems of the sixties likeHILL Top2where, by Finlay’s own account in a letter to Ernst Jandl, the words contain“the idea of a spinning-top, the hill as a clean, green top, the sense (whichone has on a hill) of the world spinning, the sound of a spinning top, and thewind on the hill, as if one felt the world spinning in space.” Nor does apreviously uncollected poem like “Lucky,” which begins, “I first readTolstoy’s ‘The Snow-Blizzard’ / In a wooden shed,” quite prepare us forFinlay’s later terse, riddling inscriptions, like the following set of nine words,carved on a tripartite wooden bench, built around a large old tree at LittleSparta: THE SEA’S WAVESTHE WAVES’ SHEAVES THE SEA’S NAVESHere the metaphoric relationship of waves to corn sheaves swaying inthe wind is clear enough, but in what sense are the waves “the sea’snaves,” given the decenteredness of the wave image? The relation, as sooften in Finlay, is not visual but etymological: nave comes from the Latinnavis for ship, and it is the ships that occupy the sacred watery spaces ofthe poem.It is the short stories of the 1950s. rather than the early poems, thatprefigure Finlay’s later verbal-visual emblems and epigrams, and theirpublication here is thus of great importance, not only to Finlay aficionados,but to anyone interested in the concrete, conceptual, and minimalist poetryof the later century, especially that of Finlay’s American friends LorineNiedecker, Louis Zukofsky, and Robert Creeley, the last of whom theforeword to the 1996 edition of The Dancers. In the magical “Boy withWheel” (1953), for example, the first-person narrator is walking home fromthe village one evening:It was just growing slightly dark. Owls were hooting in the brown fir-woodson the one side of the road; and bats, those nocturnal swallows, wereswerving and diving above my head. On the other side of the road, beyond3the sharp dyke, the fields were filling up with blue dusk. It seemed to betrickling out of the woods like smoke from a wet or dying blaze.The writing seems reminiscent at first of D. H. Lawrence, but the blue duskand hooting owls provide the backdrop, not for a particular incident or evenan individual meditation, but for the poet’s fixation on a particularinconsequential object--a detached bicycle wheel, used by a neighboringvillage boy to keep himself company on the long, dark way home:It was an ordinary silver-coloured bicycle wheel, rusted in a few placesbut with all its spokes seemingly intact. He had it gripped on the end of a fewfeet of fence-wire that secured it but did not interfere with its running. Thewheel was, in a way, like a dog on a rope. There was no tyre on it, of course.The wheel becomes a kind of icon: both man and boy, isolated thoughthey are from one another, are fixated on its silver circle spinning in the darkand later by the scrunch the wheel makes when their journey hits a badpatch of road. In what is essentially a Cubo-Futurist composition, apainting, say, by Balla or Malevich, the bicycle wheel is juxtaposed to the“four rubber-shod wheels” of a car coming along the road, and emerges asmysteriously more pristine: “It was as if we had the first wheel of all, thearchetypal wheel,” one that sets the pace for man and boy as they comedown the dark hill to their respective cottages, exchanging no more than afew words about their anticipated dinners. Yet however powerful the icon,which calls to mind Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, this silver object is discardedas soon as the boy reaches his cottage:He birled it once or twice round his head, and when he let it go it rose at a steepslant and hit the top of the bank. That was where the house had its rubbish pit. Iheard the wheel strike on what was probably an old rusted kettle or a basin in thepit. Simultaneously, or an instant after, the back door of the house was bangedshut.End of story. No plot, no characterization, and not even the sort ofepiphany we find in Finlay’s better-known story “The Sea-Bed,” in which the“great cod,” spied by the young hero on a fishing outing, becomes an4emblem of universal beauty. Indeed, “Boy with Wheel” is more lyric thannarrative, discriminating as it does between natural and mechanical,movement and stasis. The moment recalls Wallace Stevens’s “ThirteenWays of Looking at a Blackbird”: for example, “When the blackbird flew outof sight, / It marked the edge / Of one of many circles.” It is that edge wewitness in such minimalist texts as “THE SEA’S WAVES / THE WAVES’SHEAVES/ THE SEA’S NAVES.”Like Little Sparta, with its unique mix of the bucolic and theviolent—with urns that turn out to be World War II hand grenades or agarden plaque depicting a machine gun that bears the words, “FLUTE, BEGINWITH ME ARCADIAN NOTES / VIRGIL, ECLOGUE VIII,” Finlay’s seeminglypastoral idylls are tinged with menace. “The Blue-Coated Fishermen”(1953), for example, presents a perfectly ordinary fishing expedition,undertaken by a twelve-year old boy, as a journey that cannot quite evadethe squalor of daily life. The boy travels on a dreary Glasgow tram, wearing“Wellington boots which