Poetry
Availability
Shoot Low Sheriff, They’re Riding Shetland Ponies is a rare book. Currently one copy is available through Abebooks, but others lurk here and there in libraries, used bookshops and the inventories of online booksellers. If anyone has a copy and is willing to part with it, please let me know. Rmacskim@sympatico.ca
Shoot Low Sheriff,
They’re Riding Shetland Ponies
About the Book
Roy MacSkimming began writing and publishing poetry in his teens. His poems appeared in little magazines such as The Canadian Forum, The Fiddlehead, Delta, Evidence and Prism International. His early influences included D.H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Gregory Corso, Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen.
At 19 MacSkimming drove a decrepit Morris Minor convertible from Ottawa to Vancouver with his friend, poet William Hawkins, to attend the seminal 1963 poetry program at the University of British Columbia. Organized by UBC English teacher Warren Tallman, the program offered seminars and readings by Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson and other poets.
MacSkimming and Hawkins were influenced poetically by their Vancouver sojourn. In 1964 they collaborated on a self-published chapbook, Shoot Low Sheriff, They’re Riding Shetland Ponies. The book contains 23 poems by Hawkins and 24 by MacSkimming. Their friend, the painter Christopher Wells, designed the cover. About 100 copies were printed. The authors sold the book on consignment to booksellers in Toronto and Ottawa for a dollar. In 1965 the remaining stock was turned over to Bill Roberts of Shirley Leishman Books in Ottawa for distribution to the trade.
In 1966 MacSkimming and Hawkins both had several poems included in the Contact Press anthology, New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry, edited by Raymond Souster. The anthology featured 17 young poets including Daphne Buckle (now Marlatt), Victor Coleman, Robert Hogg, David McFadden, bp Nichol, Michael Ondaatje and Fred Wah.
Since that time MacSkimming has written poems but has not published them. Three appear below.
Three Unpublished Poems
Missing Person
I knew the girl
knew her forever
last Sundaythe sea was green where we lay
Tuesday I return
her face a smear, her absence
everywhereI kiss her instep in the formal sand
Formentera, 1965
Bridegroom’s Song
Lie down he
sang like
a house like a
home this
is in the
night in
the morning of
loveToronto, 1966
Couple
Out of our heads
we make the dance
circle the square
pervert each other
in the name of GodA twilight dance
neither real nor unreal
old nor new
don’t praise it
or it will dieIt follows us everywhere
we recognize it
only in the dancing
but it never
recognizes usEach making our blind
and separate movements
free yet unfree
knowing without it
we’re nothingToronto, 1966