Dark Night

April 17, 2026 Reading time: 6 minutes

I have been checking the proofs of the book, which is now with the printers, and though I am busily arranging readings, and updating all my online profiles, I am also getting reacquainted with something that I almost feel I wrote in another century. One thing that surprised me, though goodness knows it shouldn't, with a title like that, is the number of poems inspired by things that happened on nights when I couldn't sleep.

Sometimes it was ordinary observations of foxes, owls calling or people chatting as they passed in the dark. There is a footpath that runs beside our house across a grassy open field, and you often hear the young ones on their way home from parties or all-night video game sessions, the stragglers from late-running barbeques or even other insomniacs walking their dogs. More than once there were ambitious, if rather inept, burglars trying our front door. Once there were three young foxes playing on the grass, a vixen calling in the tangle of brambles above the burn. I thought about the differences between the way we see wild creatures and the way we see young people, the way we see neighbours and the way we see strangers. I remembered stories about fairy people with all the ambivalence of wonder and magic and mischief, and that in some communities, if you wanted to speak about them you called them 'the good neighbours'. It's not just who we see, and how we see them, it's who sees us.

I connected with my forgotten younger self lying awake listening to people in the street going home from the pub, or hearing heavy footsteps echoing in the entry passage between the houses.

After Bedtime

Before I could read, I slept no more than a cricket

does in summer, chirping and jumping out of bed,

inventing fears when giant footsteps sounded

in the entry between the houses - my father

coming home from night school, a neighbour

off the late shift. Bigger children playing out,

men singing in the dark, made nights mysterious,

the grownup world, longed-for and forbidden.

Now the clump of feet as neighbours douse

their barbeques and walk their dogs, young ones

slink home after curfew, girls post-mortem shifts

in friends’ relationships, lads fail to ask whose jacket

they’re wearing now, is comforting, familiar.

I have learned the landmarks. I know where I am.

I have never slept very well, even as a baby, and I was always in trouble for reading until it was dark, or jumping out to see if we had visitors, or getting up very early to write in peace, before anyone else could ask what I was doing. Later, as life got darker and more anxious, I would lie awake for hours worrying about the children, or the health of whichever one of us was in hospital, our financial stability or global warming and the end of civilisation, or if I was going out of my mind. 

Which brings me to the other 'dark night' in the book. I got to the phrase from the translation of the Homeric poem in praise of Hermes, the original 'comrade of dark night', which led me to alchemy, and the alchemical process of personal growth, and so back to St John of the Cross, whose commentary on his great poem, The Dark Night of the Soul, shows parallels with the thinking of alchemists of his day. It's a cliché now for a period of misery and self-questioning, but I thought it might reflect the time we had all gone through during the pandemic. Many of us suffered losses, bereavements, upheavals, long periods of anxiety and isolation. Some people had it easier than others, but very few of us got out unscarred in some way. There are a lot of poems in this book inspired by our housemove and settling into a new environment. It wasn't just strangeness and adaptation, it became a process of recovery - finding or making connections, accepting losses and changes, finding ways of healing and connecting, finding new joy.

Come and listen! My first reading will be at St Bride's Church Hall, 21 Greenlees Road Cambuslang G72 8JB, at 2.30 on 7th May. There will be music as well as poetry from me and Anne Connolly, tea and cake!

The second one will be at St Mungo's Mirrorball, in Waterstones on Sauchiehall Street, on 14th May from 7-9. I don't yet know who the headliner will be, but there will be several other poets reading too. This is free to Mirrorball members but £7 for non-members. Membership is £25 pa, so you only have to go to four events to be in profit, and for that you will hear some of the best poetry available in Scotland.

The book will be available from the publisher Red Squirrel Press, and from my shop, after the 7th May.

Comrades of Dark Night is Coming

March 4, 2026 Reading time: 3 minutes

This is my stock cupboard, with the two books still in print - Haggards and The Well of the Moon. As you can see, I have many copies available - my publisher Red Squirrel Press is celebrating twenty years in business, which involves revamping her website and making room for the exciting ventures she has in prospect, so, although the old books are selling well, if you want a copy, you need to buy them here.

Please do - I need to clear space myself, because soon there will be the new book, Comrades of Dark Night. The exciting phase of getting it out has started as we hope to have news of an event in the first week of May in my next post, but work is under way on the cover, and I am looking for reading opportunities and potential reviewers. 

I have a deep love for this collection. It was written during a time of intense upheaval, not only for me but for all of us, and though I really didn't want to write a 'pandemic book', it is inevitably marked by the traumas we all went through, the changes we wanted to make, or failed to make, the losses, the discoveries, the shifts in values and awareness we all went through. I think this is the most human-centred of my books. There are plenty of herb poems and landscape poems, the usual rain, weeds and rivers and seasonal changes as you might expect, but really I wanted to focus on the process of shift and settling, the way we get to know new places, the way we begin to feel we belong, what we bring with us, our growing awareness of who - and what we find there. It is less about getting to know, more about letting ourselves be known, and it's a very uncomfortable process. We not only observe, but we are observed, and sometimes judged.

There are poems that deal with discovery, but also projection, rules and barriers, and also welcome.  There are poems about conflict, loss and uncertainty, but also about solidarity and the processes of communication and creativity. The 'dark night' reference may feel appropriate, and we meet some dangerous characters along the way, but I'd like to think it emerges in a place of healing.

New Workshop - Leaf Support

February 17, 2026 Reading time: ~1 minute

My friend Susan Richardson and I have collaborated to develop a poetry workshop, which will have its first on-line appearance later this year.

The original date has had to be cancelled for family reasons, but we will be rescheduling, so watch this space for news.

Please get in touch by email at poet@burnedthumb.com or via the contact form to ask for further information and to book a place.

Twice Its Weight of Tears

January 21, 2026 Reading time: 4 minutes

Do you recognise the phrase I used in the title? It appeared once on the side of a bus to advertise an installation at Inverewe about plants and landscape - in this instance bogland. It came from a poem I wrote about peatlands and climate chane, inspired by the nature reserve in Unst, but I've illustrated it with pictures of Flanders Moss, which was the nearest peatland to where I used to live. You can read the full poem here. However, it appears that you don't have to have read the poem to have heard the phrase though. I came across it in the introduction to a book about bogs, used without any reference to the context. I'm not complaining,however. It means that it has become part of the zeitgeist, like 'the winter of our discontent' or 'I can haz cheezburger', which is rather nice, I think.

However, I have a book coming out, which I have to promote. Rishi Dastidar has a timely article in the Society of Authors magazine about branding which made me think a bit. What is my 'brand'? If you didn't know my work, how would you introduce it? It's easier now than it was twenty years ago - more people have heard of geopoetics, where I started, and there is more focus on place writing and eco poetry than there used to be. It has close observation of the seasons, weather, landscape and plantlife, raises questions of territory and belonging and the impact of political upheaval and the climate crisis. But they don't read at all like me. Partly, they are more focussed, slower-moving, and much more technically sophisticated. They make me feel shambolic and flashy. They feel grounded as much in the poetry tradition as in the earth, and they impress me with their intelligence and thoughtfulness.

But also, they don't quite satisfy me. They feel cerebral and artificial, like gameplaying with words. They do it so well, but they are short on delight. They feel professional, classical. By default, then, I have to ask myself if I am a Romantic amateur, relying on inspiration and vibes and just wanting my poetry to be 'lovely', which I am not. I spent a long and highly entertaining (as well as useful and revealing) period last year diesntangling my mental health issues from my ADHD, and I have come to the conclusion that I am in fact a medievalist. The problem I have with the new generation of place poets is that they are running, I think, on the post-Enlightenment polarity of intellect and emotion, which lines up imagination and delight with the emotions, and sense observation and analysis with the intellect. The Will, in this dichotomy is a free-floating observer, constantly forced to choose between emotion and intelligence, like Captain Marvel, playing off duty and pleasure and law and freedom against each other.

I am inclined to follow the philosophy of Richard of St Victor, a Scottish twelfth century monk, who separates the faculties of the soul into Reason and Love. He has his own purposes for this, which I am less invested in, but the interesting thing is that Reason, and Imagination line up, and Love is paired with Sense. Wisdom is a function of Reason and the Will and pleasure are functions of Love. Reason may plot the navigation, but Love is the Captain.There is a hierarchy in this, but there is also harmony.

My 'wallking the territory' practice then is about creating delight. The wilder way I can connect folklore of Fae folk with the way we treat refugees, a nest of crickets with a hyperactive child, a political upheaval with a ballad, is a function of a not only a passionately held attitude, but thoughtful speculation. I need my poetry to flow, sound well, spark appreciation of the plants or skyscapes I write about, but also, just as much, to be scientifically accurate, and philosophically coherent, and to speak to the heart as well as the brain. It is a big ask, and I am at the stage of a book's gestation where I am not confident I have achieved anything like what I wanted. But the process of asking myself who I am has been fascinating. I am the poet who draws parallels between bipolar depression and peat bogs. I wrote 

Sphagnum can absorb

twice its own weight in tears.

Condemned to be Cultural Beings

January 6, 2026 Reading time: 3 minutes

This is a phrase from Leonardo Boff's book Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, which connects ecology and liberation theology in a way I have drawn from since the mid eighties. Many of the 'Valiant Women' I mention in my long poem The Wren in the Ash Tree  (Haggards 2018) demonstrate this worldview, and many of the makers, permaculturalists and writers I follow and learn from are increasingly drawn into it as world politics descends into end-game capitalism and supremacist thinking.

But Boff also points out that a shift towards greener industries, more inclusive politics depends not only on adopting better strategies, but also a shift in mindset. He points out that we do not exist in isolation, but through the medium of our interactions with other beings, and more particularly, other people.

I’m logged in all the time, to a web

of constant dialogue, the garden, river,

weather, birds - the whole jingbang.

     (from Whooper Swans, The Well of the Moon, 2021)

More than that, our dialogue is not simply transactional, an ebb and flow of benefits and damages, but involves knowledge and understanding, and a sense of the sacred, which he uses in a way that does not limit it to the awareness of the divine. The world is more than a mirror of ourselves, it is full of the 'other', the different, the unknown, and we must reverence it in order to deal with it in a way that will enhance all of us. In such a world, culture cannot be an add-on, a mere nice-to-have when the important things are dealt with. It becomes the essential tool for justice, for peace, for healing and reconciliation, for joy - and at this moment when all digital life is threatened by the use of AI, for our very survival. To understand ourselves and our place in the world, to express it, to listen and engage with all the other beings of the earth as they are, rather than how we can make best use of them, is what it means to be fully ourselves.

Herbs and Poetry for Reclaiming What Was Lost

November 6, 2025 Reading time: 3 minutes

For years poets have mentioned Kamau Brathwaite's essay, History of the Voice, but I have never managed to track it down until someone on Bluesky kindly gave me a link and honestly it is one of the most interesting things I have ever read, creating links between my thinking on herbs as well as poetry, via colonialism and healing, and tying up with geopoetics and some work Mairi McFadyen was doing about culture and the body, and the discussion the young folk-singer Quinie had on her blog about 'singing like a bagpipe'.

Brathwaite discusses the way 'nation language' Brathwaite's useful term for the common language developed by the mixed populations of colonised people, which I will use henceforth, and culture was erased in Jamaica, and Western culture imposed. Scottish people who were told for generations to 'speak properly', that Scottish was 'slang' and not to speak Gaelic at all will understand this process, but it was taken much further in Jamaica. We are used to being marginalised and under-represented in literature syllabuses, and we know that pub quizzes will expect 'everyone' to know about the Tudors and Plantagenets, not the early Stuarts or the Lords of the Isles, but colonised communities were told they had no history or culture at all and were graciously introduced to the glories of Wordsworth or Shakespeare as gifts of the Empire. The result was children writing essays about snow falling on meadows rather than rain on canefields, poets writing in pentameters rather than the rhythms of nation language. 

It goes further than this - Brathwaite says that pentameter

carries with it a certain kind of experience, which is not the experience of a hurricane. The hurricane does not roar in pentameter. And that's the problem: how do you get a meter that approximates the natural experience, that is the environmental experience?

I have come across two examples that demonstrate this in music. One is the Mongolian band Anda Union, who play the music of nomadic people following thier horses across the steppes. It is full of the sounds of wide open grasslands and the drumbeat of horses' hooves. The other is the psalm singing of the Scottish islands, which embodies the wind and high seas crashing on the shores of Lewis. I think this process is what Lorca means when he talks about duende in flamenco - it summons the spirit of place, which gives poetry its vital depth and truth, and I think it is what Quinie means when she talks about connecting her singing with place and its people. Building such a poetics is powerful and necessary work.

In a similar way, to recover and reclaim knowledge of plants, growing skills, cooking and crafting traditions can connect a people to a place and a community. Learning the herbs of a place connects me to the soil and the rainfall, the tastes and preferences of my neighbours. But I can also connect to the history and heritage I bring with me, my mother's cooking, what friends have shared with me. The herbs and the poems

 mend a link

in the chain that leads us back to our dead,

and makes us whole, wherever we live now.