Tribute to Tessa Ransford (1938 - 2015)

Very sad news this week that Tessa Ransford has died. She was the founder of the Scottish Poetry Library and other significant initiatives to enable poetry to flourish in Scotland including Scottish Pamphlet Poetry and the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award. I only met Tessa once very briefly but I'm aware that so much of her life was devoted to developing resources for poets and poetry in her adopted country. Demonstrably she was a dynamic, creative person and a force for good who will be greatly missed. The first poem in her collection 'When it Works it feels like play' 1998 is 'The Shepherd of Remedello'. Thank you Tessa Ransford for everything you did for poetry in Scotland.

The Shepherd of Remedello

 (The prehistoric man found at Hauslabjoch
the Otztal Alps on 19 September 1991)

 He went to sleep for five thousand years
not expecting a resurrection

high on the ridge where he tended flocks
with grass-woven cloak and birch tinderbox

copper axe and flintstone dagger
bow and quiver and hazel pannier.

Did he lose the track with goats and sheep
or cross the alps in search of help

over the mountains he knew from danger
traversing the heights as farmer-hunter?

His tribe and family in Val Venosta
stitched his garments from fur and feather.

He was climbing the pass as messenger
but with broken ribs and failing breath

could strain no further in dark and blizzard.
He nicely placed his tools and weapons

lay on his side with outstretched hands
to fall asleep in deepening cold.

Shrouded in ice he was never revealed
the glacier entombed him agelessly

preserved his face and limbs and clothes
frozen for ever just as he was:

an ancestral wonder, a Shepherd-Lord
Behold the Man Who Never Died.

by Tessa Ransford.

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