“Embro” is how people from Edinburgh pronounce their city, as poet Ken Cockburn explains at the beginning of his ninety-minute walk through wondrous sites like Dunbar’s Close Garden and Queen Mary’s Bathhouse and The Stones of Scotland, a lovely and enlightening excursion that is officially a part of the Edinburgh Fringe, but also feels like an antidote to it.
Below are photographs, and a video, sampling some of the hidden gardens and quiet landmarks that Cockburn highlights in and around the Royal Mile, sometimes with tidbits of history or biography or even etymology, but always accompanied by a precisely appropriate poem that he recites resonantly from memory — famous and contemporary Scottish poems, his own poems, his translation of a poem by Bertolt Brecht.
There are, for example, the poems connected to the sad but ultimately uplifting story of Robert Ferguson, a promising poet who died at the age of 24 in 1774, and was buried in an unmarked grave, a pauper’s grave. This came as a shock years later to Robert Burns, widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, when he wanted to pay his respects to Ferguson, who influenced his own work. Burns paid for a gravesite, and a tombstone, and wrote an epitaph.
No sculptur’d marble here, nor pompous lay,
‘No story’d urn nor animated bust;’
This simple stone directs pale Scotia’s way
To pour her sorrows o’er her Poet’s dust.
The statue up top is of Ferguson, restored at least to local glory, located outside his gravesite.
Here is Cockburn, reciting Patrick Geddes’ “By Leaves We Live,” in front of The Stones of Scotland , featuring such memorable lines as “we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests.”
But ironically, right afterwards, in front of the memorial to Robert Burns, he recited a poem by Burns, “Lines Written on a Banknote,” in which, unable to make a living as a farmer, he was exasperated by his poverty (Wae worth thy pow’r, thou cursed leaf!/
Fell source o’ a’ my woe and grief! “
Queen Mary’s Bath-House
The Canongate Wall, featuring famous quotations and poems carved into stone along the facade of the Scottish Parliament.
Ken Cockburn will be presenting Embro one more time this summer, Wednesday August 26, meeting in front of the Scottish Poetry Library, as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
