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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Elizabeth

  • back from holiday


    I have been to Ireland and found my heritage, in terms of family history, culture, and some art forms I am surely going to incorporate into my work over the next few months. The weather was lovely, which was the first time you could say that since May, and we saw the Bru n-a Boinne and Tara, Glendalough, Cashel, Dublin,Kilkenny and Waterford. I can’t believe how much we packed in. There was music, history, landscape, some very kind and friendly people some good, and some very very bad food, a lovely cottage, and a pub session. Yes, I did sing. And if you push it, I’m going to do it again.
    The picture is by Paul Rimmer, and features the waterfall at Powerscourt, which is apparently the highest in the British Isles.

  • poetry in the garden

    We just had a wonderful weekend in Callander at Sally and Ian King’s Poetry in the Garden Festival. I notice a fair degree of cynicism about festivals in some quarters – Susan Hill is really bitter about them, but this one would revive the most jaded publisher. There were about fifty poets all reading over the three days. Some of them are in groups like Clylevlom and Onya Wick, but most were individual performances. There were young poets, old poets, Gaelic poets, Scots poets, English poets, some writing in dialect, some in translation. We had a poetry and jazz session, exhibitions from publishers, and a discussion on poetry and fiction. We met up with old friends and made new ones. We walked around the town, enjoyed Sally’s garden, bought books from the shop, and ate a tremendous amount of lovely food.
    And get this. The whole festival was free. No-one making money out of it at all. It was just for the love of poetry and friendship.
    All I can say is, if poetry in Scotland survives the credit crunch, climate change and cultural meltdown we seem to be going through, we’ll all have Sally and Ian to thank.

  • migraines and such

    Not much has been happening because I have had the world’s worst migraine. Research into this phenomenon implies that it can be triggered by computers, bright lights, noises, perfumes, heat, stuffy atmospheres, dehydration, humidity, food, (any kind of food), food additives, some sorts of medication, illness, shock and anxiety. Nobody has actually cited breathing while female, but it surely can’t be long.

    I will be reading at Sally and Ian King’s fabulous Poetry in the Garden Festival in Callendar on Saturday evening, 6th September. You can find out more about this three day poetry party at the Poetry Scotland website – see links.

  • still revising

    Almost completed the tinkering with Saracen Woman and she will be trying her luck again next week.
    Now I am re-thinking the Lúcháir blog, as life seems to have overtaken me, and beginning to think very hard about some elemental poems. Also about a holiday in Ireland which may actually happen. Also about Poetry in the Garden which is very much happening. I will need to read some new stuff, I think. We have had Eurydice for two years now.
    The ‘x’ key on my keyboard is sticking and it’s amazing how often you get to use it, and how odd your text looks without it. Is there anything you can do about sticky keys, or is it just time to cut my losses? I have the tiniest keyboard in the world, as I have very small hands, and though there are several normal keyboards in the house, I will certainly miss this one.

  • end of an era

    Went to sign the Scottish Covenant for Peace yesterday, and discovered that the last of the Halflings from the Youth Theatre has left school and is going to university. of course none of them look like halflings any more – they have all grown up, done well, and most of them seem to be six feet tall. One of them is going into Final Year this year. But it’s the very last connection I had with that generation. Now I have to join the grown-ups myself.
    Perhaps this is just in time. I bumped into a couple of young men in town last week, and one of them said to the other, “Mind the granny.” And there’s nothing I could say about it, because a granny is what I am.

  • playing with Lucy

    Not much work is getting done today as I am spending it with my grand-daughter. Saracen Woman is recovering from the shock it got from agents. Note the change in title. Who was I kidding – it was always Mab’s story.
    The next novel is growing at the back of my mind. I’m thinking of calling it Recusant. It’s going to be a bit Jungian, and about music.
    But I’m also thinking about poetry for Lúcháir. There are several poems about water happening.

  • meeting heroes

    I went to a book launch last night. Anne Connolly’s book ‘Downside Up’ is indeed very fab, lots of poems about Ireland and her family, but not cosy or nostalgic, just thoughtful and beautiful.
    However, I also met Christine de Luca. And behaved with some enthusiasm.

    Christine de Luca is one of my favourite poets at the moment. She is from Shetland, and writes in Shetlandic as well as English, and this gives her poems a texture and multi-layered resonances with Old Norse and with Scandinavian poetry. She says it’s hard to do, though as Shetlandic poetry has to appeal to Shetlanders (otherwise what’s the point?) and then you find yourself writing to a niche market and restricting your options. She doesn’t give into this, though. The poems in Parallel Worlds are not backward looking, not rural idylls or ballads. They bring new words, new perspectives to poems that could have been written wherever poetry is a serious art form. She writes in English too, and then you see how a different language shapes your thought differently.

    I think there’s no point in being a poet if you can’t take Orpheus’ stand and say
    ‘All the words will be available to me’. I admit I was thinking about the big fancy grandiloquent words that I was sometimes made to feel weren’t for the likes of me, Liverpool Judy that I was. Especially when the trend for vernacular poetry came in. But it cuts both ways. All the words means ALL. Dialect, academic, technical, street words, rude words, foreign, antique, abstract, ugly words and neologisms.
    I admit it takes some skill make them pull together coherently. But some people can, and I aspire to it.

  • reviews

    I got reviewed! I got a nice review!
    Seriously, a guy called Steve Sneyd reviewed Eurydice Rising in an ‘alternative world poetry newsletter’ and although it was printed in the smallest handwriting on the planet so reading it was like trying to knit your own eyelashes, it was really brilliant – by which I don’t mean just favourable though ‘fascinatingly different’ kind of trips off the tongue, but the guy really knew what I was trying to do, picked up all the obscure references (well, except the ones to the Black Parade, anyway, and who can blame him for that one), and really helped me think harder about the next project.
    Thank you so much, Steve Sneyd.
    And thanks too, to Sally who passes these things on to me. I would be nowhere without support like that.

  • round and round

    Yes I am working on the Lúcháir project, but it isn’t going very fast. I still have my head full of Saracens, and it’s hard to get focussed. So I have been going round my bookshelves picking things up and turning them over, and so far I have read
    Colour by Rose Tremain
    Medieval Lyrics ed RT Davies, who is still as annoying as I remember him from uni
    What I Loved by Siri Husdvedt which I’m sure I read once before, but can’t remember
    The Corfu Trilogy by Gerald Durrell (fun but repetitious)
    and I am in the middle of a book about the blues by Alan Lomax (which seems to have provided the entire plot for Honeydripper – a fine film btw) and The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro.
    It is all turning into a rich compost, but I have to say that it feels more like a new novel than poems and short stories, at least so far.

  • well done daughters

    Naomi graduated last Thursday, and it was brilliant. She got a first! She didn’t tell us, at first because she was waiting for confirmation and then because she expected it to be announced (which it wasn’t). So afterwards she said, Oh, you haven’t seen this’, and flashed the certificate and there it was.
    An utterly wonderful moment.
    Katherine and grand-daughter were there too, which was lovely.
    Looking over poems this morning, trying to work out what needs revising, what could go on the lúcháir blog and what could be sent out. It’s a whole new way of thinking and constructing thought and playing with language, and now my brain is waking up again after all the arthritis nonsense, I am loving it.

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