Banking Up the Fire
October 21, 2025 Reading time: 2 minutes
It is a wet, grey, still morning. The summer is over and the garden is quietly sinking into itself, with only the last marigolds and a few rogue Welsh poppies left, sparks against the wet soil and the grey painted fence. I can see the bluetits in the damson tree now, as the leaves thin out, and the robin is taking full advantage of the cleared spaces to find food in my footsteps. I'm banking everything down now, the garden, and, now that Comrades of Dark Night is with the publisher, the poetry, for the quieter winter, while I plan for the next bit.
My attitude to the garden has been enthusiastic but unfocussed so far. I've tried to get to know it - the soil, the weather, the gradient, sun and shade, I've put all the interesting herbs I could find in it, and grown them as well as I could. Learning about herbs has been a passion which I have indulged and written about for years, but of late something else has grown out of it - you can't do much about herbs without discovering a long history of cultural appropriation, neglect, suppression, forced exile, extractivism, environmental degradation and simple contempt for traditional learning and culture that goes alongside it. I want my garden to reflect some of that. I am going to focus on growing the kind of plants that are iconic in their own countries, but threatened by over-harvesting or environmental despoliation - the za'atar and Cretan thyme of Lebanon, white sage of Native American territories, the rose and rhodiola of Bulgaria, and our own cowslip and pasque flower. And I'll be looking at the issues thrown up - biodiversity loss, war, the rigged capitalist market, misinformation and the gate-keeping of learning.
It all sounds a bit grim. But you go to the herbs for healing and nourishment, colour and delight. You can't look at the herbal traditions withoout coming across myth, legend, music and poetry. The South African cellist and composer Abel Selaocoe begins his joyous and wonderful concerto Four Spirits with the movement MaSebego, giving thanks to traditional healers “for bridging the gap between the modern world and the advice of our ancestors.” I want my garden, and my writing, to reflect some of that too. Maybe we can learn to build a few more bridges, make some more poetry, cook something tasty, share a little time of peace.
William Bonar Poetry Competition
October 7, 2025 Reading time: ~1 minute
It is my great pleasure to be one of the Judges for this exciting competition. William Bonar was one of the best poets I had the privilege of editing before his untimely death, and also one of the very nicest and wittiest men in poetry.
The prize is really worth having. Partial though I may be, Red Squirrel Press publications have a reputation for the highest production values, and I have known poets weep with delight when they first see the design Gerry Cambridge has come up with for their work. (An example, I nearly cried myself when I found the wee wren hiding in the pages of Haggards.) As an editor himself, having produced The Dark Horse poetry magazine for many years, he needs no introduction, and anyone would benefit from his advice in starting a poetry career.
Charms for the Healing of Grief
September 30, 2025 Reading time: 2 minutes
The big news this week is that the manuscript of Comrades of Dark Night is finished and away to the publisher for consideration. All being well it will be out in March, and there will be a lot of promotion posts over the next few months, with news of launch events and readings and so on as details become available.
The text of the Charms poems will be in it, and we have permission to use some of the glorious artwork by Hugh Bryden, so people who didn’t buy the limited edition won’t miss out too much. However, I do have four copies left, and I would like to sell them in aid of the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library in Lebanon. News from Gaza is hard to come by and hard to hear, but a significant moment of loss was the destruction of the Seedbank in Gaza. I wrote about it here, and if you read my earlier blogpost Of Herbs and Poetry, you will see how profoundly this issue concerns me.
Copies cost £12 and all proceeds from sales will go to the seed library. There is £3 p+p but if you are in Glasgow I will get it to you by hand.
Some Geekery
September 17, 2025 Reading time: 2 minutes
There are fewer gaps on those shelves now, and I’ve even reached the point of adding layers, but what are you going to do when the world is full of interesting people writing so much inspiring stuff? One of the main reasons for reviving tis blog was so I could point anyone who might be interested in the direction of my latest discoveries, so here we go.
Misleadingly, it’s all online this time. First is a long and heavily academic article by James Paz: Storm-thoughts and ice-songs:
A creative-critical response to Old English eco-poetry
This is one for geopoetics people, eco-poets or fans of Old English poetry. It deals with the attitude of early English writers to the natural environment, pointing out that the modern division of ‘human’ and ‘natural’ didn’t really exist, and seeing the human psyche ‘imbricated’ in the natural world, shaped by it and responding to it in a way that is very different from our use of nature as metaphor. It reminds me of Lorca’s understanding of ‘duende’. For a working poet, it disappoints that he doesn’t make much comparison with the practice of contemporary poets, though Alice Oswald gets a mention. Susan Richardson and Jen Hadley have a lot to contribute to this topic – and of course, I’ve written relevant poems and discussed it a little myself! All the same, this article is grounded in a wealth of thinking and writing that I will be following up for a long time.
Then a blog from an artist known as Quinie. She is a multi-disciplinary artist and singer who sings Scots song and makes work exploring language, landscape, tradition, identity, and alternative histories. She has a record (yes, really, a vinyl LP) out called Forefolk, Mind Me, exploring travellers’ songs and the tradition of diddling and canntaireachd, but her blog is also a fascinating discussion of music, culture, tradition and place. The album is fab too.
A Web of Speaking Beings
September 17, 2025 Reading time: 4 minutes
I am fairly sure that my understanding of Melanie Klein's definition of humans as speaking beings is superficial, and I may well have taken it in a completely unwarranted direction, but the notion that humans are meant to communicate, that we derive our sense of purpose and direction and meaning from a dialogue with our fellow-creatures, and that we get our concept of identity by telling our story, and (crucially) hearing a response, is massively important to me.
There are times, of course, when silence, restraint, humility and compassion require that we don't just blurt out what's on our minds, but this too, can be a way of shaping a dialogue and building a story. What's happening now is something else entirely. It is, of course, primarily about political control, and shutting down the kinds of conversation that unsettle power-bases. But it's more fundamental than that. It is not just that corrupt powers want to control how the rest of us behave, or how we see the world. It is an attack on the very foundations of language itself, and therefore on what it means to be human.
The banning of specific words is mostly a device to enable computers to identify documents to delete quickly, without involving a human decision or understanding at any level. It leads to idiocy like the deletion of the account of Hiroshima, because the document referred to the name of the bomb, Inola Gay, and 'gay' is banned. But more than that, without awareness of nuance, context, emotion, humour, the development of language as a living thing, the way we often code our language to convey more than the dictionary can hold, AI destroys the very matrix of communication. The human is no longer able to exercise its power as a 'speaking being' and we are about as meaningless as a speak your weight machine.
Under the banner of language, I would also include art, music, and all forms of sensory learning, but as a poet, I find that words are really where this hurts. John Burnside, in his introduction to The Music of Time, points out how important poetry is. 'Poetry refreshes the language, strengthening it against the abuses of the unscrupulous and the careless, and allowing it to retain its ability to enchant, to invoke and to particularise' (p10). he talks a lot about precision of language preserving respect for truth, and the quest in poetry to widen our awareness of experience so as to name, understand and heal. For a poet, this attack on language is pretty drastic. We are your canaries in the mine.
I can see that my next collection will have to go into this more. But meantime, this book, which is almost done, will contain this:
A Hymn for Bad Words
This is a hymn for the bad words,
not the words used to abuse, words
spoken in anger or cruelty - Bad Words -
words like gay, like equality, like woman,
like climate, like inclusion, like black.
These are words that will get you banned,
defunded, your pictures covered
with brown paper, your jobs gone overnight.
This is a hymn for empathy, welcome,
a hymn for Mexico, Denali, history, acorn
and bluebell, for bats and newts, for Gaelic
on signposts and Welsh on railway stations,
words to frighten the powerful, words of strength
that put songs in the heart, and hope -
all the lost words that might summon kindness,
curiosity, honesty, joy, diversity and difference.
I summon you, solitude, silence,
listening, frugality, patience, thought.
Bring wisdom of quiet places, shared sorrow,
and hands reached out to help.
Bring pauses to deliberate, bring hope.
Bring humble apology, mending of mistakes.
Bring the building of bonds between hearts.
Bring honour for truth, bring courage, bring love.
Hauntings - Living in Ancient Landscapes
September 17, 2025 Reading time: 3 minutes
This landscape is, to be frank, no more – or less – ancient than the rest of Britain. And, given the fact that the house we live in is less than ten years old and building the estate is still going on, you might think this should be designated a brand new landscape, but I’ve never been so aware of the history of place, so haunted by the past as I am here.
The estate is still raw, and built on what was agricultural land, so I don’t get the archaeology of broken china or clay pipes that I used to find in my previous garden, only builder’s rubble and debris. But this area has been continuously occupied since neolithic times, and has had more reinventions than Troy, which Emily Wilson says was destroyed and rebuilt nine times, and there are traces of all kinds.
The first is the plants coming up in the lawn from when it was grazed land – mouse-ear chickweed, red and white clover, plantain, mugwort, and woundwort. This is a different mix from what I was used to, but it shows that there was grass here long before the houses. In fact local poets wrote a lot about green fields, rabbits and picking flowers on our hill. But not so far away, lower down than here, there were woods, and sacred wells, barrows, cairns and traces of druids in place names and quiet spaces that have somehow been left untouched.
You can trace them by place names – streets, parks, districts. Some of them reflect industries that have come and gone – mining, railways, electronics, farming and market gardening. There used to be bleaching fields for linen, orchards underplanted with berry bushes in a way that was unique to this area. There are still rogue apple trees and wild berries along the Clyde, railway tracks converted to walking trails and nature reserves. There are still Victorian houses, too grand for modern day living, and converted into flats with their remnants of status gardens, their pleached lime avenues and shrubberies. There are structures with memories of civic pride, the first public park ‘built at the expense of all, for the enjoyment of all’, with its ravine and a small amphitheatre recalling the Lang Wark – a revival meeting of a scope to rival an evangelical missionary’s stadium tours – and an imposing stone-built Institute where evening classes are still held. there are planty of churches, some named after saints who lived and worked here – Cadoc, Columcille, Mungo. And some things that were lost have come back – thrushes and blackbirds have returned to the garden, now there is more greenery for cover, bees and butterflies have shown up after the devastation of last year’s poor summer.
We are no longer the generation that would flatten a neolithic barrow to build a golf course. This is a place where the past is remembered and restored – oral histories, facebook heritage groups, but more to the point when I come to write, it is present. It reminds me how much destruction there has been, that I am not the first and won’t be the last to write here. The story of the ghost of King Caw, looking over the shoulder of St Cadoc as he built his monastery judges this generation as we build, as we work, as we come and as we will one day go.
