Remembering Schottland: Birds and Bombs and Other Trivia

May there always be secondhand bookstores. In a world that tends to value only what is digital, the secondhand bookstore may be the last bastion of the rare, the arcane and the esoteric, the book lover's equivalent of a deep-sea treasure chest, laden with books no longer in print and obscure works no longer read by authors who have long since slipped out of fashion and into oblivion.

The often chaotic and dusty shelves still beckon the seekers of intellectual flotsam and jetsam, who know that among these cast-offs can often be found lost gems and the glorious trace of human thought.

And so it was, how I chanced upon a worn and water-stained book of poetry by a minor American poet, Leo E. Schottland. The shabby, slim volume with its faded gold lettering was leaning against T.S. Eliot. I am not sure why I reached for it. Something in its forlorn appearance, I suppose, as the title was barely legible: Of Birds and Bombs and Other Trivia.

But I was immediately intrigued. Later, what I read on those yellowing pages moved me deeply. A hitherto unknown soul was suddenly speaking to me as quiet friend and kindred spirit. The poetry is not William Carlos William. Not P.K. Page. Not Robin Blaser. Although, there are moments when I am vaguely reminded of our Raymond Souster. Clearly, Schottland was influenced by Walt Whitman.

But this man, Leo E. Schottland, who lived and learned and loved, who travelled the continent and eventually settled down in Long Island, New York, is worthy of mention because his poetry reveals a person who was profoundly sensitive to the beauty and the fragility of the natural world. In many of his poems he rails against the indifference and the greed of an increasingly material society that was hell-bent on progress at any cost.

And he was writing all this in the 40s, 50s and 60s no less!

Prejudice and hate he had no time for, and he sought the ideal of a better world. For Schottland, that meant a world in which all living things were treated with respect. While Schottland clearly had a God, it was a god who dwelt in the woods, which he called his "cathedral" in one poem, such is the reverence he held for nature. In yet another poem, he reveals a disgust for the hypocrisy one often finds in organized religions. He held compassion aloft, and not the sole domain of the Christian mindset either, as one of man's most admirable attributes.

One poem relates an incident that he had witnessed, in which a young boy helped to save a small rabbit from his dog. Tenderly, he tells us that the boy "gently" elbowed the dog aside and then pushed the stuck rabbit through the fence "all the while talking to the dog." Once the freed rabbit "bounded away," the boy and the dog look at one another, expressing in their wordless exchange what the poet identifies as compassion: "And the dog licked his hand, and seemed to understand."

True, some of his language and terminology are dated, but his passion and sincerity shine across the decades. His anger at humankind's disregard for the planet is evident in many poems, such as "Betrayal":

Dying are our rivers and forests
And our sanctuaries too—
Murdered by man and his greed,
His lust and his selfishness…

Or in "Before the Bulldozers Came" he writes:

Man builds in the name of progress,
Destroying in his righteous conceit
That which is beautiful
And just as essential
As his new roads and glistening towers.

In a long and moving elegy, "An Apology to Walt Whitman" he writes these chopped lines, as if he were gasping himself in the oxygen-depleted air:

I went into the cities
And beheld a gray haze
Drifting along over the traffic
And it was gaseous
And sooty
And the air was laden
With sulphur dioxide
And swollen particles
Of lung-killing death!


At the end of the poem, he writes:

And I held a quiet converse
With Walt Whitman,
Wherever he is,
And I apologized
For what we are doing
To twentieth-century America.

If Whitman were alive today and bearing witness to the disappearance of wild spaces and most especially now to the ongoing ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, what would he write? Surely he would be appalled, angry, vocal and strident in his criticism.

What is revealed in Schottland's poems, over and over, is his anxious love for the small and beautiful things of this world—a tree, a plant, and in one poem, a turtle. It is this poem that most reveals the soul of this man and depth of his inherent gentleness. It also seems to encapsulate all that he felt about the destruction of the planet.

Here then is "A Hollowing Shell Where Turtle Dwelt":

We found it lying on its back,
A little tank—or what was left,
And, just like armored tanks in war
O'erturned, are too of strength bereft.

We found it lying there,
A hollowing shell where turtle dwelt,
And flies and ants were crawling 'round
And in and out—of the huge welt.

There on the great fen it lay,
What hand but human wrought the deed?
As, flipping on its back and propping up,
Stole its chance for life—there was no need.

No need to steal from the clean earth
A harmless dweller of the soil;
'Twas death by torture—without doubt,
But did the human heart recoil?

Nay, thought was never given to cruelty,
What could a hard-shell turtle know of pain?
God—help the heart to look within itself
And know the touch of love and be redeemed again.


I can't help but wonder how many other people out there might still remember Schottland's poetry. I hope there are many. If not, we must keep his relatively small output of work alive somehow. Which is why I share it here, and for no other reason.

As his friend Alonzo Gibbs wrote in the introduction to the collection, for Schottland, poetry was not simply a way of life but a "dedicated concern for the earth and all who dwell therein." Gibbs adds, "May his tribe increase!"

Hear! Hear!