Hamish Whyte runs Mariscat Press. He was born near Glasgow where he lived and worked before moving to Edinburgh in 2004. The poems in this pamphlet are like windows. They pay attention to detail without fuss or verbiage. You can hear through the glass perfectly.
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Hannah, Are You Listening?
It was a long time ago
and I was never on your radar
as we say now. Why you were
working in a library I’ll never know
but it gave you, no-one’s minion, plenty of scope
for saying yes and no
in the wrong places. I hope
you’ve still that sass and gall
I admired so much. After all
these years, remembering
your happy thrawnness, I just want to tell you,
long after you’d left, I did it too:
said no—to some mind-numbing
interminable catalogue-checking.
I wasn’t punished; my stock
rose; for a while I was the talk
of the staff room: the man who said No
to Miss Smith. It’s only a tiny chime
but I hope you hear it through ineluctable time.
