Sundial

My friend the art historian Stephen Bann is compiling a list of garden sculptures by the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay and writes for information about the sundial my mother commissioned from Finlay in the mid 70s. I'm delighted to be able to tell him that it's still in place and that my mother has all the documentation.

Before he got heavily into the Second World War and the French Revolution, Finlay had a thing about fishing boats. My mother's sundial belongs to this early stage of his career- and plays with the resemblance between a gnomon and a sail. 

Time passes swiftly- like a sail before the wind.....






(PS. This is the first time I've posted a picture of my mother. It was taken last summer.)

Related To The Previous Post

AS I SAILED

 

 Finlay the poet was born on a schooner

(His dad ran rum in the dry Bermoothes)

He was my friend for a brief, brief while-

 

The sundial that he made for us

Has its gnomon shaped like a bending sail.

 

What I wrote him was preachy. He never wrote back.

No loss of friendship hurt me as much

Till Snakey ditched us, our very best friend-

Our all but daughter.

 

The wind fills the sail.

It fills it with nothing, with nothing but force

 

White bellied sail like cumulus-

Like a girl near term.

 

Eliza Carthy

Is singing of Kidd,  most famous of pirates.

He burned and he robbed and he murdered he says

As I sailed, as I sailed.

 

As if in a dream, in a dream of sailing.

 

The sails go up river. The sails go down river-

War ship and lighter and pleasure craft-

Past Kidd in his cage on the gibbet at Wapping.

 

She stamps as she sings and it brings her to tears.