Margaret Tait

• Name — Margaret Tait • Born — 11 November 1918 • Birthplace — Kirkwall, Orkney, Scotland • Died — 16 April 1999 • Place of death — Firth, Orkney, Scotland • Education — * University of Edinburgh • Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia • Occupation — filmmaker, poet, author

• Illustration — House in Kirkwall where Tait was born in 1918 Tait was born and raised in Kirkwall, in the Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland, before being sent to school in Edinburgh. She 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. In 1950, she moved to Rome to study filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.

In 1952, after completing her studies in Italy, Tait returned to Scotland, 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 made films that took inspiration from the landscape and culture of the islands and the town of her birth, Kirkwall. She made most of her 32 short films and one full-length film, Blue Black Permanent, in Orkney. She also wrote prose and poetry, self-publishing in 1959 and 1960 three books of verse—origins and elements, The Hen and the Bees, and 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. A second edition was published as a Carcanet Classic in 2023. Tait's films reflect her interest in poetry. The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo is named after the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins and features Tait reading it; Hugh MacDiarmid, A Portrait featured the poet, who reads from several of his poems; of the title and content of her film Colour Poems, she wrote, "A poem started in words is continued in images." Much analysis of Tait's work foregrounds its lyrical quality. 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 Tait's 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 described her life's work as making "film poems".

• One Is One (1951) • Three Portrait Sketches (1951) • The Lion, The Griffin and the Kangaroo (1952) • Happy Bees (1955) • Orquil Burn (1955) • A Portrait of Ga (1955) • The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (1955) • Calypso (1956) • The Drift Back (1956) • Rose Street (1956) • Where I Am Is Here (1964) • Palindrome (1964) • Hugh Macdiarmid: A Portrait (1964) • The Big Sheep (1966) • Splashing (1966) • A Pleasant Place (1969) • He's Back (The Return) (1970) • John MacFadyen (The Stripes in the Tartan) (1970) • Painted Eightsome (1970) • On The Mountain (1974) • Colour Poems (1974) • Aerial (1974) • These Walls (1974) • Tailpiece (1976) • Place of Work (1976) • Aspects of Kirkwall: Shape of a Town (1977) • Aspects of Kirkwall: Occasions (1977) • Aspects of Kirkwall: The Ba, Over the Years (1981) • Aspects of Kirkwall: The Look of the Place (1981) • Aspects of Kirkwall: Some Changes (1981) • Landmakar (1981) • Blue Black Permanent (1992) (Feature) • Garden Pieces (1998)

• The Grassy Stories: Short Stories from Children (Edinburgh: M.C. Tait, 1959) • Lane Furniture: A Book of Stories (Edinburgh: M.C. Tait, 1959) • origins and elements (Edinburgh: M.C. Tait, 1959) • The Hen and the Bees: Legends and Lyrics (Edinburgh: M.C. Tait, 1960) • Subjects and Sequences (Edinburgh: M.C. Tait, 1960) • Poems, Stories and Writings, edited by Sarah Neely (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2012) • Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader, edited by Peter Todd and Benjamin Cook (London: LUX, 2004)