Stephen Scobie (Earthquakes& Explorations, Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1997, hard cover book, pp 182-189) made the following comments on this poem." The reduction of 'Life and Work' to 'Knife and Fork' is in tune with this whole mode of affectionate distancing; but it also has further resonances, which may be seen by juxtaposing Finlay's homage to Kahnweiler with Gertrude Stein's homage to Juan Gris: Therein Juan Gris is not anything but more than anything. He made that thing. He made the thing. He made a thing to be measured. Later having done it he could be sorry it was not why they liked it. And so he made it very well loving and he made it with plainly playing. And he liked a knife and all but reasonably. (Gertrude Stein, 'The Life of Juan Gris The Life and Death of Juan Gris,' transition 4 Uuly 1927]). So here is Juan Gris (1887-1927); and here is his knife ('reasonably': Gertrude Stein, in tribute to her friend); and here are his knife and his fork (and a glass, and a bottle: in, say, one of those gorgeous blue-grey proto-Cubist still life paintings from 1911-12, now in the Kroller-Muller museum at Otterlo, alongside Ian Hamilton Finlay's 'Sacred Grove'); and here are also his life and work, recorded faithfully by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (Juan Gris: Sa Vie, son oeuvre, ses ecrits [Paris: Gallimard, 1946]; Juan Gris: His Life and Work [translated by Douglas Cooper, 1947; revised edition, New York: Abrams, 1968]); and here is Ian Hamilton Finlay (Stonypath, 1974), paying tribute to Kahnweiler paying tribute to Gris (and of Finlay himself could it not well be said, here as everywhere, that he has 'made a thing to be measured,' and that he 'made it very well loving and he made it with plainly playing'?); and here, finally, is Ian Hamilton Finlay, in a letter to Stephen Scobie, 25 August 1970: '1 can't honestly say when I read [Kahnweiler], because you know I read a lot of books on Cubism when I was about fourteen, and the whole thing is surrounded by a romantic glow (the way I daresay poetry is, for some people) and sits as squarely in my heart, as fishingboats do ... Kahnweiler's book is crying out for a concluding chapter on concrete poetry - one could almost write it for him...' Finlay's attraction to Kahnweiler, and to Gris, can best be explained in relation to that phrase of Stein's: Gris 'made a thing to be measured.' More than that of any of the other major Cubist painters, Gris's work is distinguished by its clarity, its cleanness of conception and line. Kahnweiler defines Gris as a Classical artist, as opposed to the more Romantic Picasso. For Finlay, this Classical sense of clarity (the fine cutting edge, one might say, of the guillotine) is fundamental: one of his highest compli-ments is to call something 'uncluttered.' But Stein further perceives (what all too many of Gris's critics have failed to perceive) that Gris's clarity is not cold and unemotional: 'he made it very well loving and he made it plainly playing.' Kahnweiler says of Gris's painting, and of Cubism generally, that they 'made us "see" and love so many simple, unassuming objects which hitherto escaped our eyes' (168). This love for 'simple, unassuming objects' is clearly visible throughout Finlay's work, and the element of play is also plainly displayed. Many of these themes are recapitulated in a later 'homage,' the 1982 'Analytical Cubist Portrait' of 'Daniel-Henry Snowman'. The 'snowman' is perhaps a joke on the reputed 'coldness' of Gris's work; if so, it resituates that coldness within the friendly warmth of a children's game. The highly recognizable pipe" is a parodic allusion to the recognizable details that Picasso, especially, would include in his Cubist portraits - such as the precise little moustache in his Portrait Of Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (1910; Rubin 1989, 181), or indeed the pipe in Man with a Pipe (1911; Rubin 1989, 200) - and that Kahnweiler would insist on as 'clues' to the legibility of Cubist paintings. The pipe is also cross-referenced in a booklet entitled Picturesque (1991), which reads: 'It is hardly necessary to remark how the view from the house would be enlivened by the smoke of a cottage - ' - or a Picasso portrait by the inclusion of a recognisable pipe. The quotation that makes up the first half of this poem is taken from Humphry Repton (1752-1818), one of the great figures in the history of English gardening. The various associations and ramifications of this booklet will provide an opening into the richness and complexity of Finlay's own 'picturesque' garden at Little Sparta. The booklet Picturesque is itself an expansion of an idea that occurs in one of Finlay's 'Unconnected Sentences on Gardening': 'In cubist portraits the pipe has the homely air of a cottage chimney.' Finlay has issued several series of 'Unconnected' or 'Detached Sentences on Gardening',11 the model being William Shenstone's 1764 es-say, 'Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening.' Among Finlay's more memorable Sentences, I would pick out the following: Superior gardens are composed of Glooms and Solitudes and not of plants and trees. Gardens are always for next year. Garden centres must become the Jacobin Clubs of the new Revolution. British Weather is often warmer at weeding level. Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks. Shenstone's garden at The Leasowes in Warwickshire, created between 1745 and 1763, is one of the few precedents for Finlay's garden at Little Sparta. The Oxford Companion to Gardens describes The Leasowes thus: 'The visitor followed a prescribed route which presented scenes of gran-deur, beauty, and variety. Latin inscriptions and dedications invoked classical associations, and ums were dedicated to the memory of friends to provide a desirable tinge of melancholy. There were also modest garden buildings, a grotto, bridges, numerous cascades and waterfalls, and the picturesque ruins of the priory'. 'Picturesque' -when the term was first introduced, in the eighteenth century, it had the specific meaning of 'making landscapes in the manner of pictures, in particular the drawings of Claude Lorrain and Gaspar Poussin, the brother-in-law of Nicolas Poussin.' " -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.