1957 Flying Scot, Rab Wilson and Ben Bryden (2012)

An evocation of the golden age of hand-built bikes in poetry and jazz

Roncaodora Press, 978095380484, 52pp, £20

The little-known lexicon of frame building is the linguistic seam that poet Rab Wilson mines for morsels with which to evoke his love for his Flying Scot, one of the surprisingly few Scottish lightweight bicycle marques.

This collection of fifteen sonnets – studded with Nervex lugs, Zeus and Campagnolo – describes Wilson’s search for, and renovation of his Flying Scot, bikes that were built by David Rattray and Co, of Murray Street, Glasgow .

Along the way, he celebrates the master craftsmen who toiled in back streets and cellars, building bicycles that would thrill to distraction their select club of consumers. He rolls off the names of long-defunct cycling clubs and component manufactures, and offers up a roll-call of the lost cycling clubs of south-west Scotland – the Clarions, the Wheelers and the Argonauts.

At heart, this is a celebration of the vehicle, but Wilson provides at least a taste of the delight to be found on this transport.

“Old clubmen still recall with zest the fun,
That ‘whippiness’ they talked of, on a run.”

But 1957 Flying Scot is far more than a collection of poems. They are presented as an ‘artists book’, produced by, and illustrated by, Hugh Bryden. This is accompanied by two CDs, one a recording of the poet reading his work, the other containing a suite a jazz compositions by Ben Bryden that take their lead from the sonnet sequence.

It is a beautifully-produced package – the size and shape of a CD case with an outer cover in matt black, emblazoned with a chromed crest inspired by the bike’s head badge. The limited-edition production is signed by Wilson and Bryden and is rich in pleasing details, such as the chainring designs behind the CD housings and the three-colour ‘screen print’ of the title page. Each sonnet is illustrated by one of Hugh Bryden’s Clifford-Harperesque linocuts.

The sonnet redoublé comprises fifteen verses, with each successive fourteen lines starting with the last line of the one that went before. The final sonnet in the sequence is made up of the first lines of each of the preceeding verses. It is a structure from which the music borrows too.

Ben Bryden – son of Hugh, and like Wilson a native of Dumfriesshire – now plys his trade in New York, where the 26-year-old tenor saxaphonist has a fast-growing reputation. Playing with here with a quintet, his compositions are accessibly melodic, with subtle complexities that reveal themselves with repeated plays.

Each element of this package is a delight; together they are more than the sum of their parts. Indeed, the sonic, visual and literary trinity echoes the symbiosis of energy, ferrous engineering and indefinable balance that are the constituents of cycling itself.

TD Oct 12

Rab Wilson now writes a column in The National.