Slavonic Dances: Mrs Makarowski â€" The Kilt â€" The Carrying Stream

Slavonic Dances is a sequence of three linked novellas which explore the comic and tragic implications of encounters by Scottish characters with matters of eastern and east-central Europe. ‘Mrs Makarowski’, the first story, tells of a good-natured working-class Fife woman who marries a Polish soldier stationed in her area during the war, and her bemusement – amounting at times to anxiety - as she learns of the dark realities of his background. ‘The Kilt’ takes its cue from the discovery of two strange photographs; the central character is Angus Cooper, a young Scot of the late 1960s, who arrives in Czechoslovakia as a visiting student shortly before the onset of the Prague Spring, and who has an affair with a Czech contemporary at the Charles University; their relationship is disrupted by the invasion of August 1968. ‘The Carrying Stream’ centres on a Scottish poet, Martin Meikle, a Glaswegian of working-class Irish Catholic stock, who recalls in his seventies his youth in St Andrews, his love of singing and of the music of Mussorgsky in particular. He reflects on the deep roots of poetry and music in folk tradition, and the story ends with him gazing through the ruins of St Andrews Cathedral, symbol of Scotland’s tragic past, in an easterly direction.

As so often in Tom Hubbard’s work, much goes on below the surface narrative.

When you read this lovely, many-voiced book, travelling with it across borders and back through generations, you will find that you enter into a very various company … DAVID BETTERIDGE

On Tom Hubbard’s second novel, The Lucky Charm of Major Bessop (Grace Note Publications): The story … can be seen as a trial, with the different characters as witnesses, giving their statements … almost all the characters have something to hide .. keeps you guessing, right to the end. (MORELLE SMITH, in textualities); Tom Hubbard is a remarkable Scottish author … a novel distinguished by a poetically illuminating and constantly imaginative use of language … (ANDREW HOOK, in the Scottish Review).

Tom Hubbard is a novelist, poet and former itinerant academic whose second novel, The Lucky Charm of Major Bessop’, appeared from Grace Note Publications in 2014; readers are still working out the teasing clues in this ‘grotesque mystery of Fife’. Tom was the first Librarian of the Scottish Poetry Library and went on to become a visiting university professor in France, Hungary and the USA. From 2000 to 2005 he edited the online Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation (BOSLIT); for this he conducted research in many mainland European countries. Between 2013 and 2016 he edited volumes of essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert and Henry James for Grey House of New York, and a three-volume annotated selection of the writings of Andrew Lang for Taylor & Francis. He is currently preparing a third book-length collection of his poems, The Flechitorium', which draws on Fife folklore and tradition, as well as a pamphlet (for Tapsalteerie Press) of Scots versions of the work of the Hungarian poet Gyòzò. Ferencz, as well as other translations of Hungarian poetry commissioned by Dr Zsuzsanna Varga of Glasgow University. In November 2015 he was elected an Honorary Member of the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts, Budapest.

He lives in his native Kirkcaldy which has never quite succeeded in getting rid of him.