Two rather startling Edinburgh tableaux from Norman MacCaig’s A Man in my Position (mostly 1967-86), included in the poet’s magisterial posthumous collection of poems, edited by his son Ewen (Polygon, £25hardback). For once the minister is dancing, not skating!

RECLINING FIGURE BY HENRY MOORE:

BOTANIC GARDENS, EDINBURGH

It was the place that it was in

And was in what the place was. So

Its dinosaurish head poked out

Into the twentieth century.

~

It seemed as though it had been left,

Defying momentariness,

A glacial deposit, by

A geology of ancestors.

~

Yet it was, too, one mass of these

Douce citizens sprawled on the grass -

See them, ferocious ratepayers

Flirting with lovely dinosaurs.

~

DANCING MINISTER

In a one-two-three

she waltzes by, big as a brigantine.

~

Her tug, with a red-hot smokestack,

is short of tonnage, is short of horsepower.

~

She has no visible means

of propulsion. She drifts

curvaceously on

invisible swirlings and eddies.

~

A passing tug hails them: ‘Minister,

what would St Luke think of you now?’

~

The parson sweats. Theology

Was nothing to this.