The Third Side of the Coin is a manuscript of poetry exploring ironic distances, both physical and metaphysical, both slight and significant. It opens with a quote from Agha Shahid Ali who asked, "What then is separation's geography?" The poems in this collection describe the geography of separation between individuals, cultures, ideas, man and nature and the physical and metaphysical realms. As the author travels deserts, oceans, and outer space, she seeks proofs of existence and questions natural laws deemed irrefutable. This questioning is reflected in the book's title, which, on one hand, represents a state of geometric impossibility. And yet, the author contends that every coin has a third side, however narrow, marginal or fleeting it may be. It is the third side that unites diametrical opposites, that permits the coexistence of dark and the light, and that bridges the gravity and weightlessness of our existence.

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This dissertation is a collection of poems preceded by a critical preface. The preface considers Anthony’s Hecht’s long poem, “The Venetian Vespers,” and the ways in which the temporally unsettled situation of the poem’s speaker parallels a problem facing narrative-meditative poets. The preface is divided into two main sections that explore divisions of this larger conflict. The first discusses the origins and effects of the speaker’s uprootedness in time, and the ways in which he tries to both combat and embrace this dislocation by temporarily losing himself in the immediacy of observing visual art. In this section I connect the dilemma of the speaker, who wishes to escape his memory by focusing outwards, to the dilemma of a representational poet who, despite his position towards the past, must necessarily confront or recollect memories and emotions in order to create authentic descriptions or characters. The second section focuses on the production and appreciation of artistic works (both visual and literary) and how the meaning, production and appreciation of beauty are inseparable from its existence within the physical limits of time. Here I discuss the significance of Hecht’s character who is surrounded with beauty yet describes himself as a person who only observes and does not create anything. Through this character, I argue that Hecht reveals a fundamental conflict that exists between artistic creation and chronological time, and that his poem embodies a particular and paradoxical view of beauty that resonates deeply with the motivations and struggles of writing poems.

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The preface describes the construction of a book-length, interwoven sequence of poems. This type of sequence differs from other types of poetry collections in its use of an overarching narrative, repeated images, and recurring characters. Three interwoven sequences are used as examples of how to construct such a sequence.

This is a book of poems.

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“Voiceprints of an Astronaut” is a multi-faceted collection of poems that explores the fluid borders between memory and the imagined, the personal and the sociohistorical. The “voiceprints” of the title poem are the words, both imagined and real, of the only twelve men who ever walked on the moon. My own device, of an imagined ‘interview’ with figures from history, is deployed in the title poem. It is also used, for example, in the form of voiceprints from R.L. Stevenson, (“Tusitala”), Mary Queen of Scots’ maidservant, (“Beheaded”,“A Prayer fir James VI”), an acrobat-magician from the Qin Dynasty, (Bi xi Terracotta) and a time-travelling 14th century monk transposed to the Scottish Poetry Library (“In the Library”). In poems such as “Earthrise”, “Starlight from Saturn”, “In the Library”, and “Lines for Edwin Morgan” the tone is lyrical, taking the form of the sonnet, or sometimes simply reflecting the ghost of a sonnet framework. Recent events such as the Haiti earthquake are reflected, at times, by a purely personal response, such as in “Beads”, while poems about the Aids epidemic in the 80’s, (“Lunch-times with Rick”, “The Quilts”) spring from a period as Medical Correspondent for the Guardian, covering Aids conferences in London, Stockholm, Montreal and San Francisco. Others, such as “Roosevelt’s Bats”, “Fire-and-Forget” and “At Sea” are responses to modern war and conflict. In all of these, my aim has been to explore the political through the personal. The poems in this collection reflect an adult life split, almost equally, between two cities: Edinburgh and London. Regular visits too, to North America are another influence. An important part of the journey involved in writing these poems was a discovery of a Scots voice I thought I’d misplaced, only to find again, in poems such as “Beheaded” or “Haud tae me”. Some of these poems are autobiographical, dealing with parenthood, childhood, and growing up. Others, such as “Dana Point” or “Boy with Frog” celebrate a moment, a time and a place. In the case of the series of poems beginning with “Jim” and ending with “Black and White” the places and times take the form of memories, both in Scotland and Canada, of a much older sister. The critical essay that forms the second part of this thesis is entitled “Politics and the Personal in the Sonnet and Sonnet Sequence: Edwin Morgan's “Glasgow Sonnets”, Tony Harrison's “from The School of Eloquence” and selected sonnets by Paul Muldoon”. The first chapter examines the use of the sonnet form in Edwin Morgan’s “Glasgow Sonnets”; the second chapter concerns the sonnets written by Tony Harrison in from The School of Eloquence and Other Poems, published in 1978, while the third chapter looks at selected sonnets by Paul Muldoon.

This essay focuses on Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived, a collection of poems published in 1955, and tries to demonstrate how the poems within it can be organized and understood according to a contrast between more and less deceived. Through close reading and comparative analysis this overarching contrast is shown to be expressed by recurrences of imagery and thematic material as well as by a series of related opposing terms which inform many of the viewpoints expressed within the collection. These oppositions include those between illusion and disillusion, distance and proximity, surface and depth, artifice and reality as well as innocence and guilt. The essay also concludes that the overarching categories of greater and lesser deception are expressed to varying degrees by the different poems and that neither category can thus be considered as favoured above the other.