Poetry and Landscape: Following the Paths of David Gray’s ‘The Luggie’

Follow the River Cart north from Paisley to meet the Clyde, carry on east until you meet the River Kelvin at Partick and then meander along it—however you can—through Glasgow’s western and northern outerlands. When you get to Kirkintilloch you’ll cross the Luggie Water, a stream that was, despite its modest appearance, the subject of one of nineteenth-century Scotland’s most innovative, yet now more or less forgotten, poetic reveries: ‘The Luggie’. This collaborative talk and reading combines sound, film and collage to trace the life and afterlives of David Gray, one of nineteenth-century Scotland’s most innovative, yet now more or less forgotten, poets. Navigating natural and urban landscapes, cross-border literary networks, and the libraries in which Gray’s manuscripts survive today, we will think anew about the poetry of Scotland’s past, seeing it not as a fixed and inaccessible relic but as a living tradition which exists at the crossing of boundaries and borders. Part of our Oot and Aboot series, which explores the human drive to get out into nature and the transformational impact it has on us.