Ian finlay

At the age of 13, with the outbreak of the Second World War , he was evacuated to family in the countryside firstly to Gartmore and then to Kirkudbright.

Ian hamilton finlay prints

In , he joined the British Army. Throughout his life, he suffered severely from agoraphobia. The grave lies in the extreme south-east corner of the churchyard. The gravestone refers to his parents and sister. 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.

His first collection of poetry, The Dancers Inherit the Party , was published in by Migrant Press with a second edition published in The third edition, published by Fulcrum Press London in , included a number of new poems and was inaccurately described by the publisher as a first edition, which led to a complex legal dispute.

In , 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. Finlay became notable as a poet, when reducing the monostich form to one word [ 10 ] with his concrete poems in the s.

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 , although Finlay was always explicit that while "the original brief suggests sculpture being added to the garden, but I had them revise this to the understanding that the work would be the garden itself.

In December , in a poll [ 15 ] conducted by Scotland on Sunday , a panel of fifty artists, gallery directors and arts professionals voted Little Sparta to be the most important work of Scottish art. Sir Roy Strong has said of Little Sparta that it is "the only really original garden made in this country since ". The Little Sparta Trust [ 18 ] plans to preserve Little Sparta for the nation by raising enough to pay for an ongoing maintenance fund.

Finlay's work is notable for a number of recurring themes: a penchant for classical writers especially Virgil ; a concern with fishing and the sea; an interest in the French Revolution ; and a continual revisiting of World War II and the memento mori Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego.