Name/TitleOrigins and Elements
EditionInterim edition
MakerTait, Margaret
Maker RoleAuthor
About this objectSmall paperback book of poetry titled 'origins and elements' by Margaret Tait.
Medium and MaterialsOrganic, paper
MeasurementsH: 178 x W: 111 x D: 7 mm
Date Made1959
Period1950s
Place MadeScotland, Edinburgh
Place NotesMargaret Tait, 91 Rose Street, Edinburgh
PublisherMargaret Tait
Publication Date1959
Publication PlaceScotland, Edinburgh
Subject and Association Descriptionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Tait:
Margaret Caroline Tait (11 November 1918 – 16 April 1999) was a Scottish medical doctor, filmmaker and poet. Tait was born and raised in Kirkwall, in the Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland, before being sent to school in Edinburgh. Tait attended the University of Edinburgh, gaining qualifications in medicine upon her graduation in 1941. Between 1943 and 1946 she served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, where she was stationed variously in India, Sri Lanka and Malaya. Following her service, she moved to Rome in 1950 to study filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. After completing her studies in Italy, Tait returned to Scotland in 1952, where she lived on Rose Street in Edinburgh and founded Ancona Films, named after the street where she had lodged while studying in Rome. During this period she was close to, though not a member of, the Edinburgh-based Rose Street Poets, whose ranks included Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley Maclean and Norman MacCaig. From 1955 to 1961 she was a member of the ruling council of the influential Edinburgh conservationist body the Cockburn Association.
In the mid-1960s she lived near Helmsdale in Sutherland, before returning to Orkney. In the early 1970s she would make films which took inspiration from the landscape and culture of the islands and the town of her birth, Kirkwall. She made the majority of her 32 short films and one full-length film, Blue Black Permanent, in Orkney. She also wrote prose and poetry, self publishing in the years 1959 and 1960, three books of verse: origins and elements, The Hen and the Bees, Subjects and Sequences and two of short stories Lane Furniture: A Book of Stories and The Grassy Stories: Short Stories for Children. In 2012 academic Sarah Neely edited Margaret Tait Poems, Stories and Writings with a foreword by Ali Smith. This would have a second edition published as a Carcanet Classic in 2023.
Her interest in poetry was often reflected in her films. The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo is named after the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and features Tait herself reading it; Hugh MacDiarmid, A Portrait featured the poet, who reads from several of his own poems; and in the title and content of her film Colour Poems of which she wrote "A poem started in words is continued in images." [Subjects and Sequences: a Margaret Tait Reader, LUX, London, 2004. p 164]. Much analysis of Tait's work also foregrounds their lyrical qualities. Writer Ali Smith wrote of her film Aerial: "Here's a tiny poem of the relentlessness and beauty of the natural, all around us.". Fellow Orcadian, writer George MacKay Brown, wrote that her film Place of Work "calls to mind T. S. Eliot's poem Burnt Norton: Garden and house, a small enclave in time where gracious and lovely and stirring things have happened – love and birth and death.’ In the documentary Margaret Tait: Film Maker, produced for Channel Four Television in 1983, Tait would describe her life's work as making ‘film poems’.
Subject and Association Keywordswomen's writing & literature
Subject and Association Keywordspoetry & verse
Named CollectionGlasgow Women's Library
Object TypeBook
Object numberGWL-2024-28-1
Spine Labelorigins and elements ~ tait
Copyright LicenceAll rights reserved