'Areesaig', Morrarr...'
the beach stands up
in little whirlwinds of ash
in my Hispanic mouth,

the dunes become chintz
statues of white sand
poodles with griffon beaks.

Mannerism of stranded sea-horses!
Salute a small poet
murdered for being red and gay.


from 'Lorca on Morar'
            

Un Tour d'Ecosse provides a vision of Scotland from the handlebars of the ecologically friendly machine the French call 'la petite reine'. Here are poems of loss and desire, poems in Scots and English and poetry in English about Scots. There is an ode addressed to a poet by a cockroach, and a hippopotamus migrates from a New York Hotel to the Venetian lagoon. Burns, Frank O'Hara, Apollinaire and Mel Gibson have parts to play and there are elegies for the film-maker Derek Jarman and the French writer Herve Guibert. An extended sequence features a fantasy bicycle race around Scotland modelled on the famous Tour de France with Walt Whitman and Federico Garcia Lorca in the yellow jersey. From Sauchiehall Street to Carradale, Dunkeld to the Orkneys, here is Scotland as it has never been seen before.