by Tom Buchan

Thomas Buchanan Buchan was a poet, playwright/dramatist and novelist.  He was given a Scottish Arts Council award in 1969 and 1970, and started to publish his own poetry: Dolphins at Cochin (1969), Exorcism (1973), and Poems 1969–72.  He was associated with the Findhorn Foundation and lived for many years round the Moray Firth, where he died on 18 October 1995.

From front DJ flap:

"Tom Buchan has written that 'the only possible role for the writer today is a subversive one'. [sic] His poems exemplify this statement: serious to the point of insolence, they not only ridicule many of the sexual, political, religious, philosophical and educational orthodoxies of the sixties, but satirise the cult of 'Literature' itself and attempt to puncture the myth of the 'poetic sensibility'. [sic]  

His poems celebrate absurdity, weakness and imperfection; they define some of the permanent vulnerabilities, limitations, discomforts and ambiguities of the human condition. The language of the poems is usually curt and racy, but sometimes lust and pensive. The imagery is down-to-earth. Traditional ode, quatrain and sonnet forms are forced out of shape to accommodate contemporary rhetorical, conversational and neutral rhythms.

Lucid and pithy, achieving its effects without obvious satirical of lyrical fuss, this is a disquietingly scrupulous and accomplished first book."

Laid-in newspaper clippin gof Buchan's obituary.