The Dancers Inherit The Party

Ian Hamilton Finlay's early literary work has been overshadowed by his later achievements in the visual arts, particularly the garden at Little Sparta. This anthology is therefore a welcome volume, to which Ken Cockburn provides an introduction. The mordant wit of a story like "The Money" about an artist's financial situation, still has contemporary relevance; and the poems - particularly the Orkney lyrics and the "Glasgow Beasts" - shimmer with elegy, bright humour and intelligence.

Ian Hamilton Finlay is one of the most innovative and wide-ranging artists working in Scotland. The distinctive classicism of his graphic work and sculptures are instantly recognisable, whether set in the heart of busy public spaces in Europe and the States, or photographed in the oasis of Little Sparta, the garden in Stonypath in the Borders which is home to his poem-sculptures. Fishing boats, Panzer tanks, the French Revolution, the pastoral tradition of English art and the principles of Neo-Classicism run through his graphic and sculptural work, the logical extension to his fascination with concrete poetry. Yet Ian Hamilton Finlay was first known as a poet and short story writer. In America, poets like Robert Creeley and Lorine Niedecker found affinity with his poetry decades before his work began to receive the respect it is now accorded in the UK.This fully revised and updated edition of the 1996 Polygon selection of his work is expanded to set his earlier poetry like 'The Dancers Inherit the Party' and Glasgow Beasts in the context of his fiction, short plays, and later uncollected poems.

This volume surveys the life and work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who is best known for his extraordinary garden, Little Sparta, a unique "poem of place" in which poetry, sculpture, and horticulture intersect. This book directs sustained attention to Finlay the verbal artist, revealing the full breadth and richness of his poetics. It illuminates the evolution from his early years of composing plays, stories, and lyrical poems to his discovery of Concrete poetry and his emergence as a key figure in the international avant-garde of the 1960s.