Ian Hamilton FinlayCBE (28 October 1925 – 27 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener. Born in Nassau, Bahamas his family moved back to Scotland. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated to family in the countryside. He was educated at Dollar Academy, in Clackmannanshire and later Glasgow School of Art. In 1942, he joined the British Army. He died in 2006 in Edinburgh.

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Wikipedia

Finlay’s work has been seen as austere, but also at times witty, or even darkly whimsical.

Poetry

At the end of the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd, before beginning to write short stories and poems, while living on Rousay, in Orkney. He published his first book, The Sea Bed and Other Stories, in 1958, with some of his plays broadcast on the BBC, and some stories featured in The Glasgow Herald.

His first collection of poetry, The Dancers Inherit the Party, was published in 1960 by Migrant Press with a second edition published in 1962.

In 1963, Finlay published Rapel, his first collection of concrete poetry (poetry in which the layout and typography of the words contributes to its overall effect), and it was as a concrete poet that he first gained wide renown. Much of this work was issued through his own Wild Hawthorn Press, in his magazine Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.

Finlay became notable as a poet, when reducing the monostich form to one word with his concrete poems in the 1960s. Repetition, imitation and tradition lay at the heart of Hamilton’s poetry, and exploring ‘ the juxtaposition of apparently opposite ideas’.

Art

Later, Finlay began to compose poems to be inscribed into stone, incorporating these sculptures into the natural environment. This kind of ‘poem-object’ features in the garden Little Sparta that he and Sue Finlay created together in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh. The five-acre garden also includes more conventional sculptures and two garden temples.

Hamilton Finlay and George Oliver’s 1973 Arcadia screenprint uses camouflage in modern art to contrast leafy peace and military hardware. He continually revisited war themes and the concept of the Utopian Arcadia in his work.