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.
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.
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.
I’m back, although not as often as before. I miss the long-form responsive sort of chat I used to do, and though I want it off the main website, because I need that to be more focussed and professional, I though some other people might like the more ephemeral background stuff to the poetry. There is a new book in the works, which will come out in March next year, and I have cooked up some thoughts about healing and transformation, the dislocation of moving to new places, confronting ‘otherness’ and art.
Three and a half years ago I moved here from a shady garden, with deep fertile soil, rather damp, rather acid, and I’ve had to adjust to something very different here. It turns out that this garden is, as Culpeper might have put it, ‘under the dominion of Mercury’. Mercury’s plants tend to do well here, for reasons I don’t yet fully understand. The soil is good to heavy, but with a lot of stones in it, not just builders’ rubble and hard core, though there’s plenty of that, but ‘coal measures’ – layers of mudstones and limestone shale above the seams of coal that defined this area until fifty years ago. There is sun, some fertility, but not too much, shelter from the prevailing winds, and enough rain, which they like. As herbs, they tend to be nervines, picking up magnesium from the soil, and therefore good for the nervous system, the brain, memory, coughs and, often, digestion. This garden loves lily of the valley, southernwood, elecampane, lavender, fennel and winter savory, and they thrive here, where many of them struggled in my previous garden.
It is easy to see why they are ascribed to Mercury – the intelligent, volatile, lively and ingenious god of language, communication and creativity – the god of the mind. Mercury has a difficult persona – as a god, he’s a trickster, a shapeshifter, notorious liar, ingenious, dangerously fluent and persuasive, and frankly, about as endearing as Dominic Cummings. And yet. He is the trusted messenger of the gods, the guardian of travellers, protector of herds and herdsmen. His dual personality reflects what was discovered about the planet through history. It is closest to the sun, and the fastest mover – the Assyrians called it ‘the jumping star’ and the Greeks called it ‘Stilbon’ the sparkling star, because of its flashy volatility. It was seen only at evening and morning, which meant that for a long while there was uncertainty about whether it was even one planet or two so Mayans represented it as twin owls one for morning and one for evening. The metal called after him is anomalous, a metal that rolls around on a flat surface like a ball, that divides and rejoins like water, a liquid that isn’t wet. It’s not surprising, then, that when alchemy was extensively studied, Mercury became associated with the process of transition and transformation, forming a triad with the sun and moon. Sun herbs like marigolds and rosemary and moon herbs like mugwort and vervain do well in this garden too.
Mercury appears to have had an older presence, before he was shown as the tricksy boy. He was represented as a standing stone, or a heap of stones usually at a boundary, and may have been thought of as the duende – a spirit of place, with its ambivalent overshadowing presence, sometimes kindly, sometimes punitive, incorrigibly untameable and alien. He is like the Viking concept of ‘luck’ – while it’s with you, everything is fine, but if it’s against you, you are ‘ogiftumađr’, the unlucky man, a Jonah, and nothing will go right. He is the bwbach, the broonie, the trowie, the good neighbour, one of the fair folk, sometimes a pharisee, or a saracen. He is the stranger, the unpredictable other, the one who may be dealt with for good or ill, but never completely trusted. When Mercury goes retrograde, people get very conscious of trains being cancelled, letters lost in the post, computers crashed, fallouts and misunderstandings betweeen friends and families.
I’m haunted by Shakespeare’s line ‘the words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo’(Love’s Labour’s Lost). A pairing off of lovers is halted by news of the death of the Princess’s father, and the happy ending has to be postponed while the feckless students and frivolous maids grow up. It is one of a few Shakespeare references to the ephemerality of art, especially theatre, possibly inviting us to dismiss it as a shadow (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) or a jest (Hamlet), compared with the serious nature of real life. But it’s more complicated than that. Mercury invented the lyre for Apollo, and says there is no god he will honour more. Words and music intertwine in both poetry and song, performance and communication. Heart and head, feeling and technique have to come together for art to do its job. Despite his propensity for lying, Mercury introduces us to the hard truths that precipitate growth, change and ultimately a negotiation with reality that leaves us in a better place.
Moving to ‘the dominion of Mercury’ sparked new relationships with the earth, with my neighbours, and with the unfamiliar reaches of myself – and a lot of new poems. Look for bats, ghosts, foxes, druids, rivers, music and herbs. The book is due out in March 2026, and I’m excited about it.
Stonehaven may well be my new favourite Scottish town. In spite of the nightmare of cancelled trains, the journey turned out to be lovely – I must admit, Scotrail staff are enormously kind and helpful if you get caught up in this kind of thing. I was only just thinking how much I missed the open fields at harvest time, but going up through the East coast big sky country, there were fields of wheat, packed heavy and still in the gentle morning sun – how good the weather was! – hayfields all harvested and open to the sparrows and finches, cows and sheep, white houses knee deep in the hedgerows and little green wooded river valleys.
Stonehaven itself is lovely. I’m not sure what I was expecting – something industrial and abandoned perhaps – but it isn’t like that at all. Its seaside resort days are past their best, but the lovely stone houses are still there and the main street and market square have interesting shops and evidence of a thriving artistic community. And there’s the harbour and the sea, though I didn’t have time to see them.
The Festival is brilliant. It is very well-organised – communications from the organisers have been uniformly timely and helpful, and the venue Number 44 Hotel was very generous and hospitable. I hope they made a packet from all the poets and friends who came, because they deserved it. The contributors are a rewardingly diverse bunch – different levels of experience, different genres, different backgrounds – and the audience was the warmest and most receptive I’ve seen in a long time. I sold a book, and bought three – that’s how these things go – and we swapped books and news and met and made friends as happens at all the best festivals. And heard some great poetry.
The squirrels: From left to right – Carolyn Richardson, Edwin Stockdale, Judith Taylor Helen Boden (behind), Elizabeth rimmer, Tim Turnbull, Hazel Cameron.
Thank you to everyone who organised, participated, attended or otherwise enabled such a lovely day. Especial thanks to Judith Taylor who organised the showcase in the absence of publisher Sheila Wakefield who is still battling long-term illness, and to Edwin Stockdale who – with Judith – manned the stall. I’m really looking forward to furthering my acquaintance with both the Wee Gaitherin and the lovely town of Stonehaven next year.
Today is World Wetlands Day. I have form with wetlands, since my poem about blanket bogs was used in an installation by the Royal Botanical Gardens of Edinburgh, and even featured on the side of a bus to advertise it. This is a later poem, however, from The Well of the Moon, which deals with the Avalon Marshes in real life, but also the landscapes of our hearts and heritage, and the myths we create to try to express them.
Lost Roads I am haunted by wet places, the lure of rivers, reedbeds and green lands of ash and willow. The drift of water, pooling between the autumn stems and wind-frayed flags of common sedge and reed, is like the course of blood, of thought, deep in the mulch of me. There is talk of lost roads, boardwalks of planks and narrow handrails hid deep beneath the quaking ground with its stealth of buntings, stepping heron, its shattered tops of bulrush, spilling cottony seed for birds like new coins at a wedding scramble. The hidden past, with its myths of Romans and lost queens of the Iron Age, threads its careful way through thickets of imagined story, and I, not immune to this casual appropriation, imprint my own lost ancestors, finding or inventing the feel of home here, roots where there may be none, whole trees growing into the open wind and sky.
I’ve been thinking about the celebrations that have happened this week, whether you call it the Feast of St Bride, Brigid’s Day or Imbolc. I am delighted that in Ireland it is being kept as a public holiday – goodness knows we could do with one at this time of year, and I’m not sure that Robert Burns Day quite has the impact. These spring celebrations are all about returning to the light, or bringing into the light things that have been nurtured in the dark, and so I thought I might write a little about my four poetry books, that don’t seem to have seen the light of day much lately.
Wherever We Live Now came out in 2011, published by Red Squirrel Press. It has a lot of seasonal poems in it, a few about exploring my Irish heritage, and a sequence about the Orpheus myth, which was the closest I ever came to an artists’ practice statement. It has a cover image by the film-maker Alastair Cook, a Berneray landscape showing the land merging with sea and sky.
The Territory of Rain came out during a very scary time in 2015 when my husband was hospitalised with myasthenia gravis, which probably explains the rather high proprtion of death poems in it. The hospital was wonderful and they discharged him just in time to come to the launch. This is the most explicitly geopoetical of my books, and has a very special cover image by Gerry Cambridge on the front. How special it was I didn’t realise until 2019, when his book The Light Acknowledgers (Happenstance Press) and I found it was a picture he had written a poem about.
Haggards came out in 2018. It was centred around herbs and dealt with social and environmental collapse and regeneration. I think it is the most popular of my books, having been reprinted twice. Gerry Cambridge excelled himself with the design, providing not only the beautiful cover image, but a tiny wren hopping about on the title page of the sequence The Wren in the Ash Tree.
The Well of the Moon came out during the pandemic. It has a lot of plant and herb and landscape poems as you might expect, but was inspired by mental health issues (my own and other people’s) which lead me to reflect on what ‘a person’ is, and what the sense of identity is made of. Gerry’s cover image this time features a crescent moon and a feverfew plant, which appears in the first poem in the book.
The two most recent books are still available from the publisher, but the first two are out of print. I still have the last remaining copies, however, if anyone would like them. You can buy them from my shop, and I don’t charge for p+p in the UK. You don’t need Paypal either as I’ve enabled credit card payments.
All of that was three years ago, and it’s probably time I was thinking of a new one. The news is, I am indeed. So far it is called The Midsummer Foxes, and is about land and belonging, magic and death, the self and the other – and music. It won’t happen for a couple of years yet, but yes, it is coming into the light!
I have struggled with a Christmas poem this year. I was reminded of the story of Christian de Cherge at the Mount Atlas monastery, saying to the terrorists who came to the monastery, “This is the birthday of the Prince of Peace, and you come bearing weapons”. The terrorist leader apologised and left the weapons at the door, at that time. Peace is a hard concept to think about just now. Then I went out to the garden.
Ausculta is the first word of the Rule of St Benedict, and it is usually translated as ‘listen’. But it’s more than that, It means an active attention, engagement leading to understanding, and a heartfelt response.
So here is my Christmas message – wishing you happiness, good company, delight, and also peace.
Ausculta The wind is in the cypress tree, a long shout over the hawthorns, ruffling the dignity of the magpies’ showy livery. The sun glows on the new bulb shoots and the random unseasonal violet. The leaves are all down, turning to cold mulch around the rogue seedlings of last year’s neglected berries. There’s a riff of starlings around the feeder and a single collared dove among the groundling pigeons. I can hear spring begin to whisper beneath the drone of distant traffic, in the heave of frost-lifted ground and the quiet undersong of the little burn. Dark is gathering, but light waits, in the hush where we might hear the song of angels, and a voice that speaks of peace.
The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way: we this way.
Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost
I have been musing on the Sea Swallows episode of Karine Polwart’s Seek the Light programme on Radio 4, and the relationship and the differences between song lyrics and poetry. I started my writing life as a folk singer and a fantasy writer (don’t even ask!) and my first efforts were songs both for myself and my characters. I was very influenced by ballads – the ‘muckle sangs’ of the Scottish tradition, such as Tam Lin and The Twa Corbies, and I still am. I learned simplicity and directness, and not to waste words on hints and explanations and ‘scene setting’. I realise too that I still think of poetic rhythm in terms of dynamics and time signatures rather than stress and metre, which gives scope for variation and complexity, and I write by reading aloud, because poetry is something you hear as much as read.
I wasn’t very good as a song writer, not only because my melodies were simplistic and full of cliches, but because back then I didn’t understand the demands music makes on lyrics. If we have to choose, I’m for the words of Mercury. I work really hard at words. A good poem can create links and resonances that overload a melody. You can go forward and back, pick up echoes, go slowly through a stanza, stop at a phrase or skip a line. You have time and attention for layers of meaning or step outside a poem altogether to enter a whole new landscape. And you can afford to make every word, every line, new and different. A reader has the headspace to pay attention.
Listening to a song is very different. Familiarity is important. Simplicity and space is important. Rhymes matter, because a good rhyme might be predictable, but it is as welcoming as a well-prepared cadence. It doesn’t matter if you have filler syllables the way it would in a poem:
The weary earth we walk upon She will endure when we are gone
Karine Polwart Rivers Run
because the voice makes good use of them. Words are there to guide you through the music, and the music is there to interpret the words. You may visit the realms of thought and imagination, but more likely you will find your emotions stirred and become deeper acquainted with your heart. Writing a good lyric is a synthesis, and requires knowing what not to do, how to create space, when to leave well alone. A poem that falls flat on the page (like most of Burns, as far as I am concerned) can fly as a song.
All this makes Karine Polwart’s work extremely interesting. She is braiding spoken word and song, stories that are more potent than anecdotes, music that brings together thoughts and ideas in a richer and more wide-ranging than songs. Words and music that Shakepeare sends off the stage in separate directions are brought back together.
I have been so glad of the garden lately. The mix of sunshine and showers has brought everything on, and every day there is something new to look at. It isn’t just the herbs, either. I have had our own lettuce, strawberries (never more than four at a time, but so tasty!) and potatoes for a few weeks now, and on Friday I got the first tomato.It was a new variety to me – Ruthje – which is an elegant peardrop shape, and not too big. I think I was a bit impatient, as it wasn’t really ripe, but there are plenty more to come, so we’ll see. The sweet peas have done well, and the poppies have been amazing – bright shots of colour in what would otherwise have been very gentle misty pastels. My grandson has been fascinated by the developing seed pods, so I hope he will help me harvest them when it comes to seed saving time.
Now that my husband is home again, the bird feeders are better maintained and we have flocks of sparrows and starlings clustered around them like fat bunches of grapes. We’ve even seen an ambitious magpie trying to twist itself into the right angle to get hold of a fatball, and there was a greater spotted woodpecker one quiet morning. I think there might be a hedgehog visting at night, because there was something moving in the shade of the fence in the dark. I have been woken several times by an owl flying in, calling, and its claws grating on the fence as it landed, and one spectacular night I looked out to find three foxes, almost full-grown, but clearly still adolescent, playing and chasing each other across the rough grass behind our house.
This had me thinking. When I first heard the sounds, it wasn’t animals I was thinking about. Now that the schools are on holiday, there are young people wandering about at all times of the day and night. Mostly they are just going home after parties, or setting off to catch early flights on holiday (that particular lot were far too lively for four o’clock in the morning!), or hanging about chatting and skylarking, away from their parents. Pretty much like the foxes, to be honest. I wonder if I would have felt more ambivalent about human prowlers? Yes, a hostile human can do more damage that a fox, but our neighbours are not our enemies, even when they are teenagers, are they? Sometimes they do seem as alien as the foxes – I’ve heard older people describe younger ones as ‘roaming in packs’ – but it’s natural and necessary, at some periods in your life, to distance yourself from the authorities in your life and from what’s expected of you, and renegotiate the boundaries between yourself and the world. And it isn’t easy to live with for a neighbour as much as a parent.
Somewhere in my head the wandering boys and the foxes are getting mixed up. There’s an Irish ballad called Sly Bold Reynardine, about a were-fox who seduces unwary maidens, lures them to his den on the mountains of Pomeroy and drowns them. And I remember that some people used to refer to the Faeries as ‘the good neighbours’ so as not to provoke them. There are poems here, and notes for the non-fiction book.
I feel as if I have been spinning my wheels on the whole writing thing for a long time, not only while my husband was in hospital, but since we moved, since I finished The Well of the Moon in fact. I’ve done a lot of reading, and a lot of editing, and a lot of planning and drafting and to-do lists. I went on a course last summer to learn how to write proper essays, only to be told I should ‘be more poet’.
It turns out to be right! There is a fox poem, possibly one of a sequence, and I’ve found my way in to the non-fiction. I’m following the ballads and the charms into the liminal spaces, renegotiating boundaries and allowing the poetry to shape the prose. It seems that if you find the form, the words flow much more freely, and I’m looking forward to finally making some progress with my own work.
You may have noticed the news post about the Red Squirrel Press showcase at the Scottish Writers’ Centre next week. It’s a chance for those of us whose books came out during the pandemic to have a live launch and nine of us will be reading. At this point, I’m feeling the miss of William Bonar and Ruby McCann who should have been with us, but won’t, as they both died in 2022 – particularly grievous as they had so much wonderful poetry to share with us.
I am picking the poems for my set, and trying to get back to what I was thinking about when I wrote them. I was reminded of some of it at StAnza, where there were several poets writing and talking about grandmothers, and a good few poems about dissociation, both of which were triggers for the book, but it also included a lot of reflections about how we see the world and our relationship with it, our memories, so unreliable in one way, but so important and illuminating in others, and the nature of hope, and where we find it.
In Haggards I wrote about the world as ‘a web of speaking beings’, and, though The Well of the Moon is a more personal book than that, it built on and developed that concept. It’s one I got from Julia Kristeva, who used it to help children with mental health difficulties, particularly victims of abuse. She stressed the importance, to a person in difficulty, of being able to speak your truth, and know you are heard, and, through my own experience and that of members of my family, I have come to value this very much. But The Well of the Moon is also about something else. I believe a human person is not only a ‘speaking being’, but a ‘listening being’ – a being in dialogue.
Oh, world, my mirror, my just-like-me, I know myself in you. We are most when we are most connected, when who we are, is who we listen to.
From Ma Semblable, Ma Soeur
Other things sneaked into it. There are more poems than I realised at the time about violence against women, and the particular wisdom of women, more about friendship, mental illness and grief, and there are a lot of poems about birds. I got a bit hung up about fire too, which was a pity, as we have since moved from a house with a coal fire I loved, to one without any fireplace at all. There are some translations, from Latin, Old English and Old Norse and a complicated poem about the rainbow which is really about the process of translation, and of course there are poems about plants and the garden.
Far Field is the final part of a trilogy Jim Carruth has been working on for the last twenty-five years, and forms a magnificent culmination to what feels, for more than one reason, like a life’s work. Like its predecessors, Black Cart and Bale Fire and the standalone poetic novel Killochries, it deals with farming life in rural Renfrewshire, but this volume is more personal than the others. It focuses on his own family life, the family farm, the handing on of skills, property, and tradition.
The first section, Landscape with Cattle deals with representations of rural life and features many poems about pictures by the Glasgow Boys, Crawhall, Guthrie, George Henry and EA Walton, who were famous for depicting rural life in less romantic perspectives than had been common. Yet Carruth finds even these pictures of ‘hinds’ and manual labourers self-indulgent, patronising and ignorant of the lived realities of the lives they depict, which are dark and harsh certainly, but also rich in family bonds, empathy with the beasts the farmers care for, and the beauty of accurate observation – cows standing in a river, in Crawhall’s Landscape with Cattle defy the artist’s attempt to recreate their calm presence, and the contrast with the fidgety birds that flit round them.
As Carruth’s hind’s daughter says: This painting that does not show me true.
The second part Earthstruck, builds on this sense of empathy with the animal life of the farm, the parallels between the life of the beasts and the life of the farmer, birth, death, illness, courtship, love, loss. The boundaries between animals and lovers, animals and family, blur with references to a review of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a gamekeeping manual, a misread conversation where the roast lamb on the table is mistaken for a comment about the speaker’s lover, and the deaths of farm animals compared to the deaths of farmers. Some of the poems are humorous, nostalgic, sarcastic or affectionate, but most moving is Gone Out where a child’s tantrum because his father has slipped out to look at the animals without him is recalled at the father’s death.
Somewhere beyond the cries of loved ones You’re walking your dogs in that far field Watching the herd, waiting for the next life.
Gone Out
In the final section, Stepping Stones, we move out to the wider community, to the landscape, to memory, and reflections of the future, and the book closes with Planting Aspen Saplings, father handing on the tradition and the responsibility to son. Aspen is an endangered species, but an important one to the Scottish landscape:
You tell me of the tree’s offer To gall midges, birds, hare, deer
The importance of relationships The interconnectedness of everything
They do not thrive in shade, need light And space to grow.
Planting aspen saplings, Son and father.
Planting Aspen Saplings
The echoes of Seamus Heaney I find in these poems do not feel derivative, but establish a connection between two poets aware of the influence of landscape and farming on their work, but each with their own different and unique perspective on it. An Irish/Scottish tradition which enriches us all.
