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Welcome to the website of the
writer Mairi MacInnes
From The Spectator, 6 June 2009
FATHER FELIPE
Father Felipe came to talk
to John, who loved Spain.
After an hour I brought in tea,
silver pot on silver tray,
fresh scones, butter, jam,
and put to him a damnfool question:
What was it like (sugar?)
to be a Spaniard (milk?)
in the North Country,
the North Riding of Yorkshire
(‘so far from home, Father Felipe!’),
and had him answer mournfully
he disliked relativism,
whether Spanish-English,
Catholic-Protestant,
Christian-Muslim, north-south,
man-woman. Father Felipe,
young and scowling,
taught singing to boys.
That was his métier.
He knew where he stood
in music, sung music, choirs.
There was nothing to refute
up there on the moors.
And he looked down, angry.
I said nothing, nodded only,
full of his rebuke,
and thought of the absolutes
he must have lived by
and the harmonies he heard
and taught, and how we lived,
relatively speaking,
complacent, worlds apart.
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Brief Biography: Mairi MacInnes was born in 1925 in County Durham and educated in Yorkshire and at Somerville College, Oxford. In 1954 she married the American scholar and writer John McCormick and went to live with him in West Berlin, then an enclave in Communist East Germany, and from 1959 to 1988 in America, except for years in Mexico and Spain. She and her husband now live in York, England. They have four children and two grandchildren.
Awards and Fellowships
National Endowment in the Arts Fellowship
New Jersey Arts Fellowship
Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowship
Witter Brynner Fellowship
On this website you will find instances and reviews of her work. Her publications, including the recent Clearances: a Memoir, her latest poetry collection, The Girl I Left Behind Me, and other books can be purchased from:
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