by Alexander Moffat
Like a number of poets of his generation Hamish Henderson saw active service in North Africa during World War II. It was there in the desert, in the middle of the war that he began writing poems which were published in 1948 as Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica.
In a new series of paintings inspired by the Elegies, Alexander Moffat places Hamish Henderson on the ‘road of history’ as a “remembrancer” in the hope that his poems would help create a better world – worthy of the tens of millions who had died in an avoidable world war of unconscionable brutality.