Celebrated Scots poet George Bruce, OBE, MA (1909-2002) is set to become the latest addition to Makars’ Court, where Scotland’s most esteemed writers have been celebrated since 1998.
Located in the Capital’s world-famous Old Town, Makar’s Court is the Scottish equivalent of Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey.
Bruce will join the lofty company of Sir Walter Scott, Rabbie Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson and others at Makars’ Court where he will have a memorial flagstone inscribed with his name and the line:
The sea trembles - voiceless
It is the rare moment
when a word is sought.
(from Pursuit. Poems 1986-1998. Haiku Envoi).
Hailing from Fraserburgh in the north-east of Scotland, Bruce’s poetry references his family’s seafaring heritage in the herring trade and his own upbringing on the wild North Sea coast.
In addition to his extensive work as a poet, Bruce worked as a BBC producer for over 20 years and on his retirement was appointed as the first Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, alongside similar posts in the USA, and a Scottish Australian Writing Fellowship. In 2000, he received an honorary Doctorate from his alma mater, the University of Aberdeen, to add to another from Wooster College Ohio.
Reflecting on a literary career spanning over half a century, Bruce has been hailed as being ‘arguably the last great poet of the Scottish literary renaissance’ (The Guardian, 2002).
Cllr Lezley Marion Cameron, Depute Lord Provost, said:
I am delighted that the words and works of George Bruce are being celebrated and commemorated in the Makar's flagstone dedicated to him and unveiled today. Edinburgh continues to be rightly proud of our UNESCO City of Literature status and of our unique and evolving literary monument that is Makars' Court."
Councillor Val Walker, Culture and Communities Convener for the City of Edinburgh Council, said:
George Bruce’s addition to Makars’ Court reflects his indelible mark on Scottish poetry and he can now take up his rightful place alongside the finest literary figures in our nation’s rich writing tradition. Makars’ Court is a central fixture on the Old Town tourist trail and provides an opportunity for visitors and residents alike to explore the very best of Scotland’s writers. I would like to thank the sponsor of this flagstone David Bruce; this will be a moving and fitting tribute from a son to a father.
The sponsor for this inscription, David Bruce said:
Our family is delighted that my father is to receive such a recognition and be in the company of the most distinguished Makars of this and previous ages. He would be proud to be numbered with them. It was Professor Alan Spence who said that George Bruce should definitely be represented in Makars’ Court, and we are very grateful to him, and to the City of Edinburgh Council, for bringing this project to fruition.
NOTES TO EDITORS
About George Bruce:
George Bruce, OBE, MA, was a native of Fraserburgh where the family was in the herring trade. This inheritance is strongly reflected in much of his work, in Scots and English, not least in his first collections, Sea Talk (1944) and Saltire Modern Poets (1947). Kurt Wittig described Bruce’s poetry of that period, such as Kinnaird Head, as, ‘Hard as the rocky foreshores of the North East’. Wittig also said that later the granite of Buchan was superseded by Edinburgh limestone, grimy and friable’.
Bruce’s many collaborations and co-authorships included with several distinguished figures in the visual arts including Ann Redpath, William Gillies, Elizabeth Blackadder and John Bellany. With Blackadder he made illustrated haiku; with Bellany, two large folios of responses between poet and artist.
Of his anthologies, the most substantial is Today Tomorrow: Collected Poems 1933-2000 (Polygon 2001), but it was Pursuit – Poems 1986-1998 which won the Saltire Scotsman Award for the best Scottish book of 1999 by which time the poet was 90. In 2000, he received an honorary Doctorate from his alma mater, the University of Aberdeen, to add to another from Wooster College Ohio.
Throughout his life, Bruce was much involved in the promotion of poetry. As well as his life-long association with the Saltire Society, and PEN, he was an Honorary President of the Scottish Poetry Library and laid the foundation stone of its present building. His archive papers are held by National Library Scotland.
Bruce’s poems continue to be bought and republished, for example as the Poem of the Day in The Herald. In that context, on 12 February 2021, his Love in Age was twinned with Burns’ John Anderson my Jo, the two poems engaging in very similar sentiments.
ABOUT MAKARS’ COURT
Makars’ Court, an evolving national literary monument, is located beside the Writers' Museum in Lady Stairs Close. There, people can read some of the famous words of great Scottish writers inscribed in the flagstones, with quotes ranging from the 14th century John Barbour to Dame Muriel Spark, who died in 2006. New flagstones continue to be added.
The Scots word Makar means "one who fashions, constructs, produces, prepares, etc". (Dictionary of the Scots Language), and in a literary context it is the role of the poet or author as a skilled and versatile worker in the craft of writing. We have many such wordsmiths living in Scotland, and to celebrate the importance of writers in our lives, in this UNESCO City of Literature, Edinburgh has adopted its own version of the Poet Laureate: the Edinburgh Makar. The office of Edinburgh Makar is currently held by the poet Hannah Lavery. The office of Scotland’s Makar is currently held by the poet Kathleen Jamie.