The Blue Sail

‘The Blue Sail’ is a selection of poems by Ian Hamilton Finlay written and published in small, fugitive editions over nearly forty years. They are ordered to take advantage of the breeze of the turning pages, to allow themes and forms to tack and turn through the course of the book, rather than by chronology.

Several quite different selections might have been made from the published work. In this instance, to give lyrical coherence, many characteristic themes are absent. For typographical consistency, and to allow the reader to move freely through the book, we have excluded any work requiring illustrations or footnotes.

Although Finlay’s formal inventiveness is wide-ranging, often incorporating the material support for the words as an integral element, we have chosen to make a simple book of poems, to stay as close as possible to the understanding that it is within language that the blue sail is first sewn.

David Bellingham & Thomas A Clark