Art soothes us and assists in our survival. Whether we as artists use ourselves as subjects; as writers who channel autobiographically, as designers who think outside the box from inside the smaller box, as photographers who capture something of the moment that others’ missed, or as architects who work climate change into their vision; it is the consultants and curators who are the ones that are creative with space, they open up a civilisation of sharing and generate new paradigms, new ways of looking, new ways of holding.
Asa poet, at no time did I dream that I would one-day name streets or buildings or a large part of the city, (or appear on TV chat shows) yet it is happening because people are asking for more poetry in their every-day, it helps us feel alive again after being stilled, shook and shoved sideways by all the desensitising media of our year, never has our readership felt it more deeply. But of course, poets are wordsmiths, poets are memory keepers, and we abbreviate meaning from a reduction of wide emotion, history, culture and landscape, so indeed, it seems fitting for a poet to play with that language of giving name and title to things. These things are meant to last, these things are what we leave behind as evidence of how we lived, and we are seeing, time after time, the need for art in our environment to keep our teachings fresh. The Romans wanted their art to be useful, to tell the future generations something of the past. And I think, similarly, Edinburgh Park carries that circumference, there is storytelling in the environment, each curated creative has depicted something that has a deeper or wider tale to tell and variant symbiosis to share. We are not just looking, we are engaging, we are thinking. What felt impossible has now become thinkable.
It is a delight to see the first of these street names now sited at Edinburgh Park – Airborne Place
AIRBORNE PLACE Liz Lochhead (1947–)
My tales won’t speak abstract art, they fall apart in paint;
I want them to live in air, the streets that they were born.
Further street names as the development and wider visions unfolds will be:
COMET KISS STREET Edwin Morgan (1920–2010)
The galaxies slipped into kaleidoscope once more
comet kisses melting against sun, at seventy.
CARRADALE GARDENS Naomi Mitchison(1887–1999)
High over the harbour of Carradale; ghost quatrains
written, clams cooking, washing blowing in the wind.
BEAT STREET Douglas Dunn (1942–)
Voyages of navy fleets attack the broken heart
Blood keeps the undaunted beat from the end to the start.
HAAR STREET W.S Graham (1918–1986)
Gregorian thunder, haar, sunsets change colour,
the sea’s spherical miracle sings us back to shore.
GENIE AVENUE Hugh MacDiarmid(1892–1978)
Summer is a genie promising to offer us
whatever we wish from the triage after Earth’s crash.
BOTHY WYND Hamish Henderson(1919–2002)
To pipers, drummers, border shepherds, bothy songs,
ballads of soldiers, poems as anthems, I belong.
MOONSHINE WYND Sorley MacLean(1911–1996)
You let the birch tree decide its moonshine bardic cry
as the long dead walked the empty forest of Raasay.
JIGSAW MEWS Tom Leonard (1944–)
I saw thi wurd jig through the sound like my heart bypass
an open dictionary in my chest, jigsaw fast.
HOMER LANE Iain Crichton Smith(1928–1998)
Raised in plain Highland mud, cities glittered for you;
Homer in hand, heart undone, fast trains, a well-stocked mind.
