In the Summer of 1963 or '64 I hitchhiked through much of Ireland with my fiancée, developing a fondness for the place and discovering the metabolic mysteries of Guinness. We already knew Dublin. The night ferry from Glasgow's Broomielaw had for years been a well-known rendezvous of the west of Scotland's lovers in search of a night's amorous privacy. It is not the manner in which Irish–Scots connections are discussed these days, but it will do.

In a Dublin bookshop I bought a copy of a magazine, Arena, edited by James Liddy. It contained a poem by Derek Mahon, an uncharacteristic one to be sure, but I found it interesting. At the age of 21 or 22 I was in the process of identifying writers, poets especially, with whose work I could find an affinity. As a young librarian I had access to books, but the Andersonian Library of the Royal College of Science and Technology, subsequently University of Strathclyde, was not exactly stocked with volumes of modern or contemporary verse, never mind little magazines. While I knew a few who wrote poems, or tried, and knew of others, and was becoming familiar with the work of my immediate elders, mainly Scots such as MacDiarmid, Edwin Muir, W. S. Graham and Norman MacCaig, in the early 1960s Iain Crichton Smith was just beginning to establish a reputation, as was George Mackay Brown. Edwin Morgan was little more than a name to me.