Editor Brian Strand has put together in chapbook form an attractive and entertaining collection of 119 cinquains by William Soutar (1898-1949). Soutar is probably best known as one of the Lallans (Lowlands) Scots poets, including Hugh MacDiarmid, who wrote in dialect as part of the renaissance in Scottish poetry of the 1920's. Soutar was though highly adept at writing English language cinquains, as this collection attests.

The title of the collection, Flowers of Life, comes from Soutar's cinquain "Eternal Spring," which, editor Strand notes, "echoes the view of so many that poetry is without doubt the flower of literary forms" -

ETERNAL SPRING

Poems
Are flowers of life
Which being picked rebloom;
Budded on lips out of the heart's
Warm dust.

Strand notes that the cinquain form "is particularly suited to the English language. . . and adaptable to a great variety of topics, as is shown by the examples I have selected for this booklet." While many of the pieces in the collection are on nature themes such as the poem just quoted, Strand is correct that Soutar's range of topics is wide, as in the following poem which references T. S. Eliot -

ELIOTANIA

The heart
Hears its own ebb
When it begins to love
The sparse leaf-murmur from the poet's
Waste land.

- an interesting editorial comment on the American-born poet who rocked the literary world with the brash experimentalism of "The Waste Land" (1922). Thank goodness that the bleakness Soutar appears to detect in that early poem of Eliot's is not reflected in his own work. Rather, instead, the poet displays a joyfulness and expressed faith in God, as in the following three examples -

TRANSPARENCY

Earth shines
Between God's love
And the desires of men
A crystal bead upon its thread
Of light.

THE CERTAINTIES

The bud
On the bare bough
Seed-time and harvest-home;
The certainties which are earth's gift
To faith.

LAZARUS

Brightness
Upon the grass:
And out of common ground
Life from its cerements gleams in cloth
Of gold.

One more gem-like example which well shows Soutar's fine mastery of the cinquain form -

SEA SERPENT

Broken
Against a cliff
The hissing wave drags back:
Folds, and reforms, and rears again
To strike.

In publishing this collection, editor Brian Strand obtained the permission of the National Library of Scotland. He includes a select bibliography in which he recommends for further reading The Collected Poems of William Soutar, edited by Hugh MacDiarmid (Andrew Dakers Ltd.). It is a recommendation well worth following up given the fine, entertaining nature of this chapbook of Soutar's cinquains. I highly recommend the collection to lovers of verse as well as aficionados of the cinquain.

Reviewed by Christopher T. George