Helen Cruickshank

Helen Burness Cruickshank (15 May 1886 – 2 March 1975) was a Scottish poet and suffragette and a focal point of the Scottish Renaissance. Scottish writers associated with the movement met at her home in Corstorphine.

Born in Hillside, near Montrose, Angus, of local parents, she went to school in Montrose. Summer holidays were spent in Glenesk and the landscapes and people of Angus and its glens appear in her poetry. After leaving school, Cruickshank entered the Civil Service, working first in London for the Post Office from 1903 to 1912, and then, from 1912, in Edinburgh, where she spent most of her adult life. She joined the Women's Social and Political Union and actively campaigned for the Suffragette cause. She was also a committed Scottish nationalist, an active member of the Saltire Society, and a founder member of Scottish PEN, which she served in various ways. She encouraged the work of the young Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid), of James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon), and other writers, and was sympathetic in her appreciation of the poetry of Violet Jacob and Marion Angus. Helen Cruickshank devoted much of her life to other people (she cared for her elderly mother), yet published poetry over several decades, in Scottish chapbook, Northern numbers and many other journals, and in Up the Noran Water (1934), Sea Buckthorn (1954), The Ponnage Pool (1968), Collected Poems (1971) and More Collected Poems (1978).

Helen Cruickshank's best known poem is probably Shy Geordie which, like much of her work, is in Lowland Scots and draws on her Angus country heritage (the poem has been set to music by several people, including Buxton Orr and Jim Reid, a Dundee folksinger, not the member of the Jesus and Mary Chain). Many of her poems echo ballad and folksong and other traditional forms. In Glenskenno Woods, There was a sang or Fause friend show a range of mood and tone, from lyrical to humorous, and her best work avoids the charge of sentimentality which might sometimes be levelled. She draws on the natural world for strong symbols about human life, as in the fine Sea Buckthorn (set to music by Francis George Scott), or in Ponnage pool, prefaced with a quotation from Hugh MacDiarmid; this deals with questions of personal identity:

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