Gordon McKechnie

This article was written in 2015 and first published, in an abridged form as part of a longer article, by "East-West Review" in its Spring/Summer 2018 issue (Vol. 17, no. 1, ISSUE 47). Pskov charmed me immediately. And with the passing of days, the charm only grew as we strolled along the riverside walks among the evening rollerbladers and picnicking families. By the mouth of the little Pskov River , where it empties into the Great River between two medieval towers, we sat on the terrace of a tavern. We drank beer - "903" - brewed at the microbrewery next door. From the opposite bank of the little river, above the round medieval towers with their conical wooden dunce-cap roofs, the Kremlin rises steeply. The setting sun coloured the white walls of the Trinity Cathedral that soar even higher still within the Kremlin. The charm of the setting was not shattered by the sound of distant explosions. Nobody looked up from their beer and their conversation....

A slightly shorter version of this article was originally published in Make It New - the online journal of the Ezra Pound Society - in December 2017. I am grateful to Roxana Preda, editor of Make It New, for her encouragement in writing this article. Copyright © 2017 J.G. McKechnie The Castle of Excideuil , January 2015 In the summer of 1919, less than a year after the end of the Great War, two young American poets, Ezra Pound and TS Eliot arranged to meet in Excideuil. After Eliot's death in 1965, when Pound was asked for some words by way of elegy, it was to this 1919 meeting in Excideuil that he referred (Pound 1966) -             Recollections? let some thesis-writer have the satisfaction of “discovering”             whether it was 1920 or ’21 that I went from Excideuil to meet a rucksacked       Eliot. Days of walking—conver...