"This volume surveys the life and work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who is best known for his extraordinary garden, Little Sparta, a unique "poem of place" in which poetry, sculpture, and horticulture intersect. This book directs sustained attention to Finlay the verbal artist, revealing the full breadth and richness of his poetics. It illuminates the evolution from his early years of composing plays, stories, and lyrical poems to his discovery of Concrete poetry and his emergence as a key figure in the international avant-garde of the 1960s"--

"This volume surveys the life and work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who is best known for his extraordinary garden, Little Sparta, a unique "poem of place" in which poetry, sculpture, and horticulture intersect. This book directs sustained attention to Finlay the verbal artist, revealing the full breadth and richness of his poetics. It illuminates the evolution from his early years of composing plays, stories, and lyrical poems to his discovery of Concrete poetry and his emergence as a key figure in the international avant-garde of the 1960s"--

A companion to Midway, this is the second volume of letters of Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), the leading Scottish poet, artist, sculptor, and garden designer. His garden at Stonypath, now called Little Sparta has been described as the only truly original garden created since 1945. These letters to and from Finlay's friend, the English poet and scholar Stephen Bann, center on the initial development of the garden near Edinburgh. They cover Finlay's turn away from poetry towards sculpture and garden design and the thinking behind, and consequences of, this development.