Date Published: 10th April 2022

April 2022

Dear Readers,

In a Time of Distance is a collection of poems that I have written over the past few years. The title refers to the experience that we have all had recently of being cut off from many of those with whom we normally lead our lives – a strange period. The poems, though, are not in the slightest bit bleak: they are notes, so to speak, accompanying my life. They are my thoughts about place, about people, about the ordinary business of life. Although this is a book of poems, it is also a book of musings, in which each of the poems is accompanied by reflections on the circumstances of the poem’s creation. It is, in other words, a bit autobiographical.

The subject matter is pretty wide. Some of the poems are about journeys, and each of these is preceded by a note about the circumstances in which I made the journey, and about what I felt on making it. So, for example, there is a poem with the curious title College of Hypnotherapy, Next Right. I wrote that when I was travelling in a car, as a passenger, I hasten to point out, en route to Santa Barbara, California. Suddenly I saw a sign on the highway saying just that: College of Hypnotherapy, Next Right. Surely it is only in California that one might see such a sign – nowhere else would that be believable. So I wrote a poem about it. The sign would effectively say: listen to my voice, you have to turn right; you have no alternative; you have to. Then there is a poem I wrote in aeroplane, when I was reflecting on the very flat language used by aircraft crew when speaking to the passengers. What if a pilot were a bit of a poet and used rather richer language? That thought became The Language of Pilots, in which these lines occur:

Ladies and gentlemen, rain

Falls in distant veils;

Look from your windows

To the starboard side

Of this metal tube

We call an aircraft;

Look out there, and see

The rain, the grey-white

Shafts of rain …”

At the end of the poem, the pilot announces:

Goodbye: for soon these great engines

Will be silenced, as will I.

There are poems about India and Africa; about Scotland and Canada. There are poems. about animals, about fish, about elephants. One of the poems about fish is also about love:

For a fish to climb

A submarine mountain

Without water

Is as difficult as for a man

To climb Everest without oxygen;

It’s the same thing,

Say fish; it’s the same thing

But viewed from

A different perspective.

 

Love, say fish,

Is much the same thing as water;

Without it all about us,

We feel dry.

 

The book has marvellous wood-cut style illustrations by my collaborator, Iain McIntosh. It is published with my love.

 

Alexander McCall Smith, April 2022