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In a much cited letter of 1963 to Pierre Garnier, Finlay declared that his own poems could be called “suprematist,” in that his own sense of concretism as a “model of order” owed a debt to Malevich’s creation of “perfected objects, to be again embodied in the perfection of absolute, nonthinking life.” And indeed Finlay’s concrete poem of the same year, Homage to Malevich—a word square made of two permutating words, black and block—graces the cover of issue #8 of Finlay’s journal Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.—an issue dedicated to ten Russian avant-gardists from Natalia Goncharova to David Burliuk and including translations of Khlebnikov by Edwin Morgan and line drawings by Mayakovsky. The back cover of this issue of Poor. Old. Tired. Horse reproduces Mary Ellen Solt’s White Rose whose subtitle is “Homage to Goncharova.” A second Finlay Homage to Malevich, this time a color print appeared in a one-page booklet of 1974; the image has been reproduced in a number of sizes and colors. But how “Suprematist” are these paintings and poems? Malevich, let’s remember, wanted his abstract forms to bring to mind the Fourth Dimension, as Ouspensky had defined it in the Tertium Organum; his geometric forms appear to float, adrift upon the white ground of the rectangular canvas. In Suprematism: Eight Red Rectangles, for example, the bright red opaque, thickly painted rectangles—all of them different sizes and on different axes and none of them fully rectangular— are designed to appear to be in flight, poised mysteriously to collide with one another. Again, the diagonal black and red cross of the later Suprematist Composition, whose opaque black horizontal plane hides the less dense vertical plane beneath it, seems to erupt mysteriously from the white ground of the painted canvas. In contrast, Finlay’s Homage to Malevich of 1974 is presented as a poster; its flat surface creates none of the illusion of actual flight we find in Malevich, and indeed there is no Malevich composition precisely like this one. Whereas Malevich’s crosses present a dialectic of black and red forms, etched against a thickly painted and complexly colored “white” background, Finlay introduces his orange-red cross at a 45˚ angle, calling to mind an airplane lifting off the ground and clearing the debris of small and narrow objects in its path. A small mirrorimage of the red cross, this one navy blue, reappears on the lower right side canvas, flying in the opposite direction on the light-gray ground, this time with a “tail” of leaves and crossed branches in its wake. Not a mystical image of outer space, as in Malevich, but a signifying puzzle, the branchleaf shape resembling the form of a rocket. “Which 20th Century Russian artist sometimes depicted himself as the Best Aeroplane?” Finlay asks in a 1977 booklet called The Wild Hawthorn Art Test, referring to Malevich’s fascination with flight. In the context of the visual poet’s later images of revolution and war, Homage to Malevich can be considered an image of aerial bombardment (see Abrioux 166). But even if the branch-leaf motif were not designed to evoke rocketry, the introduction of vegetal representations into the stark, purified world of geometric abstraction would be entirely out of place in a Malevich. In Finlay, in other words, the natural world, banished from the Suprematist universe of “Zero.10,” reasserts itself. As in the case of the garden art of Little Sparta, Finlay’s the fact is that Malevich was the only Suprematist, and the movement to which he belonged was more broadly called Futurism, sometimes Cubo-Futurism. Ian Hamilton Finlay, “Letter to Pierre Garnier, September 17th, 1963,” Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971) 84. The first issue of Poor. Old. Tired. Horse was published in offset printing by Wild Hawthorn Press in 1963; the journal went through twentyfive issues before its demise in 1968. The interest in the Russian avant-garde was probably prompted by Finlay’s poet-friend Edwin Morgan, whose translations of Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, etc. are outstanding. Ian Hamilton Finlay / Michael Harvey, Homage to Malevich (Wild Hawthorn Press, 1968). In this one, the cross is dark blue, the smaller rectangles red against a gray ground. In later versions, the cross is orange-red, the smaller rectangles black, against a yellow ground.