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“... a pea below her twenty mattresses is hurting her. A prince is metamorphosed from a frog (the poet Norman MacCaig used to say it would be even better if a frog metamorphosed from a prince). Wordsworth, feeling he had to deplore the increasingly moralistic instruction of the young, refers in The Prelude to those ‘guards and wardens’ who would ...”

“... or patience, to check his intuitions against the evidence. Thus, whereas he rightly recognised in Norman MacCaig a Scottish poet who wrote better in English than others had done in braid Scots or Lallans, he could still in 1950 endorse Herbert Read’s foolish and sweeping judgment: ‘There is no great English poetry written by a Scotsman.’ Had ...”

“... the other, they can recover or reconstitute innocence in their medium. And even a senior poet like Norman MacCaig, who is too old a hand to chase such a will of the wisp, has nevertheless over the last twenty years moved perceptibly nearer to such seemingly limpid, seemingly artless styles. Indeed, such accommodations have become so much the rule since ...”

“... his youth among a generation of thrawn poets with their country expansiveness: I’m thinking of Norman MacCaig in his Assynt mode; Iain Crichton Smith of the Highlands; George Mackay Brown in his Orkney remoteness; and Hugh MacDiarmid, always in among the fields and dykes, metaphysical or real. None of these men gave much quarter, and, next to ...”

“... speaking the poems in Gaelic. I was lucky to be on the stage of the Abbey Theatre when Sorley and Norman MacCaig came to Dublin to read at the launching of their excellent poetry records: my job was to read some of the translations (this time by Sorley MacLean), but my interest was in hearing the Gaelic. Again, this had the force of revelation: the ...”

“... is also the countryman of a number of more recent poets, including Sorley MacLean, W.S. Graham, Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, Douglas Dunn, and the tactician of Little Sparta. Not far from the small cottage near Biggar where MacDiarmid spent his final years, Ian Hamilton Finlay, another courageous, controversial and embattled artist, has set in ...”

“... The Martian School, The Metaphor Men. Who are they? Christopher Reid, perhaps? David Sweetman? Norman MacCaig? Philip Larkin? Seamus Heaney, perhaps? Doesn’t Heaney’s description of a lobster –articulated twigs, a rainy stonethe colour of sunk munitions –vie with Raine’sscraping its clawslike someone crouchedto keep wicket at Lord’s.Like ...”

“... Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both books of Stephen Spender suggests that he has slipped out of contention – either because his true worth has yet to be ...”

“... My only country​ /is six feet high,’ Norman MacCaig wrote in 1973; ‘and whether I love it or not/I’ll die/for its independence.’ This sort of muscular individualism, teetering on the edge of satire, is now unfashionable in MacCaig’s country. Scotland styles itself instead as a place of co-operation and the commonweal ...”

“... Karl was introduced to the mighty poets of Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch, among others. MacIver played some of the part of a father, taking Karl all over town to whatever was happening on stage or on screen. MacCaig was to become a lifelong friend, guide and ...”

“... the Rose Street milieu of 1950s Edinburgh. For a time, Brown mixed there with Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Sydney Goodsir Smith and other poets and literati. With its prostitutes and smoky, male-dominated pubs sporting signs which stated ‘Women Not Supplied’, Rose Street was a shithole of gender politics, emblematic in some ways of the ...”

“... Henderson’s was a life of balladry, passionate public argument (his flytings with MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig were particularly memorable), and direct action designed to raise the demoralised Scottish people from their apathy. In 1952 a symbolic coup was achieved by the reiving of the Stone of Destiny, pinched from Westminster and returned to Scotland ...”

“... star. But there is a difference. Good poets in the Alvarez anthology, like David Holbrook or Norman MacCaig, have their counterparts in the present collection, but while not being egotistically impetuous and obsessed in the way Alvarez desiderated, they were also not haunted, as their successors appear to be, by wistful feelings about ‘the ...”

“... of which the charming (c.1850) print of Ballantyne’s Close, Grass-market, over against Norman MacCaig’s poem, ‘Edinburgh Courtyard in July’, may be taken as typical, both in respect of quality and of relevance to the text. Visiting Englishmen are admitted and the locals range from Drummond of Hawthornden to Garioch, ...”