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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Poetry

  • Birds Were Singing in the Dawn

    Cold Winter Blues

    I woke up this morning,
    cold winter blues all round my head.
    Woke up this morning,
    cold winter blues all round my head.
    If you don’t leave me woman,
    I’ll make you wish that you were dead.

    I woke up this morning
    snow was lying all around.
    Woke up this morning,
    snow was lying all around.
    Until the ice is melted
    there ain’t no road back to town.

    I woke up this morning,
    birds were singing in the dawn.
    Woke up this morning,
    birds were singing in the dawn.
    If you ain’t careful, woman,
    you’re going to wake and find me gone.

  • Huldra-Folk

    The word ‘huldra’ means hidden, or cloaked, and the huldra-folk of Scandinavian mythology are the elves or trolls which live in the quiet places on the fells or in the forests. There are roads in Iceland which bend to avoid elf-rocks.Once upon a time I wrote a novel in which a charismatic but ruthless poet wrote a collection of poems which he called Huldra-Folk. I think this was his equivalent of G.K.Chesterton’s ‘silent people’- the working class -(“We are the silent people/and we have not spoken yet”). The novel was set in the seventies, and this guy was not above using a fashionable political motif to get publicity, though his actual politics were laissez-faire to the point of callousness. However, I gave up writing novels long ago, and it recently occurred to me that I should probably write the poems myself.

    They aren’t going to be left-wing poems, at least not on purpose, and I think some people might not see them as political at all, but just as the Feminist movement of the 80s used to say that the personal was political, we might want to think nowadays that the environmental is political. Certainly issues about food security, land use and ownership, energy generation and conservation are all going to become overtly political in the next few decades. But I’m looking in a wider, but more subjective way, at what’s ‘hidden’ in our environment – the secret wildlife in our gardens, in our cities, in our thinking. It’s fascinating. And I’ve just finished the first few poems.

    I can’t show them here, not even in draft form, because I want to send them somewhere, but I’ll let you know how they get on.

  • Two Winter Haikus

    fifteen long-tailed tits
    trapezing on the birch stems
    catching December sun

    dark wings against the snow
    two buzzards circle, harvesting
    the dead of winter

  • Selected Poems By Kerry Hardie

    This is a book by a poet who is new to me, which I bought at StAnza, and I am so pleased I did. Kerry Hardie is an Irish poet who writes about a lot about home, exile and travelling, the Irish landscape, alive with birds and changing weather, and the people who live there, about illness death and bereavement. It is domestic poetry, in that it grows from the engagement with home and family, but not domesticated – by which I mean that it is not sheltered, cosy, narrow or sentimental.

    People talk a lot about restoring a lost connection to the earth, and there is a lot of poetry which tries very self-consciously to re-create that connection, often by air-brushing out the people, as if ‘wild’ nature was somehow more natural. There is, of course, a real problem in very urbanised or industrialised societies – you only had to look at the opening of the Olympic Games to see how dominant the built landscape and the technological mindset is in England. But this book is a poetry of the human inhabitation and involvement in landscape. It is no less knowledgeable or realistic about the natural world than some of the ‘geek poets’ I reviewed earlier this year, or the wild writers, but it does feel more assured, more grounded, even more genuinely progressive.

    It’s also more accessible. The style of these poems is deceptively easy. They read like notes to friends, snatches of conversation with – or about family members. But the language is acutely visual, tactile, atmospheric, and the thinking is profound. Way back when I first went on line, and my blog was hosted by LiveJournal, I had a rant about religious poetry, which is so often a over for preaching, confrontation or simply shoddy poetics and/or theology. Not this time. This is how you write good poetry about religion. I love it.

    You can find out more about Kerry Hardie on the Bloodaxe website: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/personpage.asp?author=Kerry+Hardie

  • (from) The Place of the Fire

    Under the parched grey coal
    the red glow dulls.
    The ash settles softly,
    a quiet inward collapse
    like the gentling of your face
    on the pillow, as you fall
    deeper into sleep

    One of the inspirations for this piece was a blog post from Rima at The Hermitage called Atching Tan, which dealt with the life of travelling people. It will, I hope, become part of what I hope will be a long sequence of ‘elemental’ poems for The Territory of Rain. I thought originally it might be all about our attitudes to the environment, but now it’s become much more about life and death and love (especially death, apparently), and includes metamorphoses,and stone circles and the rather under-rated Celtic figure of the Cailleach. It’s fascinating, but it’s awful slow.

    There may be fewer photos for a bit. My camera is having an attack of temperament, and all the pictures are coming out streaky and full of pink irrelevance. But I’ve dug the vegetable patch and pruned the roses, and there are crocuses and snowdrops in full bloom, and daffodils and tulips thinking about what happens next. All the geese are heading north and there are more ducks than ever on the river. I’ll try to have a substitute camera organised for next week.

  • fairy tales and reinventions

    In a casual throw-away line in my previous post, I said I should maybe try a Rumpelstiltskin or Baba Yaga sequence next, and the idea has grown on me since then. The Orpheus sequence was written as a fairly androcentric one, simply because the artist/muse thing seems to be such an androcentric issue, and it helped me think about some issues in a fairly uncluttered way. After all, the guy’s side of the story is so familiar, and there was quite enough newness in what I wrote without going completely off-piste.

    Also it’s still a given in some levels of cultural thinking that male experience is normative for human. It’s quite easy to assume that artist/doctor/traveller is male, and, in liberal quarters, that women can play too, now we’re liberated. And we do, some of us. We read ‘poet’ and we identify completely with the experience and understanding and where poetry is the thing, not gender, why not? Of course Orpheus is me as much as all those guys, and I’m not pretending I don’t have some of those illusions and pretensions either.

    But sometimes the experience is different. It’s not just biology or society or circumstances. Women’s work , women’s stories, women’s maturation happen across different territory, not all of it domestic. But then domestic is also interesting is it not? I am thinking seriously about all the girl fairy-tales – not just the reinterpreted ones, but the ones where girls are always centre-stage, and marriage is not the only outcome – Vassilisa the Beautiful, Cap O’Rushes, Mother Holle. There is a lot that will bear thinking about, not only the mother-daughter relationship – I’m not convinced anyone needs to write any more about that – but sisters and neighbours and communities of women.

    This will probably take quite a while. I am planning a new stage in the lúcháir project, which involves learning a whole bunch of stuff about photo-editing and HTML that I never expected to have to deal with, and family events and politics are claiming more of my attention than usual.

    Watch out for The Wave on 5th December.

  • The Orpheus Tradition

    Someone suggested that my Eurydice Rising Sequence was so complicated and illusive that I should write a whole essay on the romance and ballad tradition, so I have. I’d be interested in comments from anyone who knows about it.

    The Orpheus Tradition

    The classical story of Orpheus is simple and well-known – Orpheus’ beloved wife is stolen by Hades, and dies. Orpheus goes to the underworld to rescue her and plays so well that he is allowed to take her back, so long as he does not look behind to see if she is following him. He does look back, and she is lost forever, and Orpheus, distraught, is killed by Maenads because he refuses to play for them. It is told in many cultures and many formats, from Boethius’ allegorical understanding of Eurydice as Soul, beguiled into Hell by the pleasures of the senses, rescued by Orpheus as Reason, but lost through his weakness and want of dedication, to Offenbach’s irreverent satire on marriage and conventional thinking, in which both Orpheus and Eurydice are glad of the opportunity to set up with someone new. Everyone seemed to have their own take on what was happening, whether like the Orphic cultists, they believed that Orpheus had established the belief in life after death, or like Ovid, that he was the first homosexual.

    What fascinated me most of all as I got to know more about the tradition, was that as the story was dispersed and retold, many versions did not end with tragedy. As the story moved north, it happened more and more that Orpheus actually got Eurydice back.

    In the Breton lai, Sir Orfeo, Orpheus is both a knight and a king of England. His wife Herodys (I did recently hear an undergraduate without any classical background pronounce Eurydice like this – it made my day) is kidnapped by the King of Fairy as she slept under an ‘ympe tree’. This is a grafted tree, distrusted because such tampering with nature was thought to be unnatural. In medieval times such a tree was believed to leave anyone who slept there vulnerable to the otherworld, and the image of a grafted tree was sometimes used, as Perdita does in A Winters Tale to symbolise a lack of integrity. Orfeo is so distraught with grief that he leaves the court and goes into the wilderness for ten years – a ritual time of trial called a ‘moniage‘ . In Moniage 1 I have referred to the best known example of moniage in medieval English literature – the obscure but charming poem Maiden on the Mor Lay.

    At the end of the ten years, Orfeo sees the a hunting party and discovers that it is the Wild Hunt (slua sidh in Irish folk tales) – the Fairy people on an expedition to the everyday world. Oddly enough, he does not recognise who these people are, but is reawakened to his own identity by remembering his former hunting days. He sees Herodys among the court, but she is not able to respond to him, and he follows the hunt into an underground world filled simultaneously with horrific visions of lost people, those dead by misadventure, or women dead in childbirth, murder victims, and lunatics – people who ‘are thought dead and are not’ – and beautiful visions of the wealth and luxury of a royal palace. He sees Herodys both sleeping under her tree, and as a queen dressed in gold at a banquet.

    Orfeo performs as a minstrel and is promised whatever he likes as a reward. When he names Herodys, the King questions his fitness to marry her, but acknowledges that he has to be bound by his word, and he places no obstacle placed in the way of Herodys’ return. When Orfeo returns to Winchester to reclaim his throne, he disguises himself as a beggar to test his steward’s loyalty, and his welcomed out of loyalty to the absent king. The story ends with both marriage and kingdom restored, and the steward rewarded.

    The Shetland ballad, King Orfeo, although similar in many ways, is a more simple ‘fairy-taken’ story which draws on the Celtic bardic tradition. The king of Ferry pierces King Orfeo’s wife Isabel with a ‘dart’ and takes her away with him. Orfeo pursues them, but they disappear, leaving only a grey stone – the traditional gateway to the other world. He plays his pipes and is invited inside. Once there he demonstrates his expertise in the three modes of music expected of a bard : Goltraighe, ‘the weeping strain’, here called ‘da notes o’ noy’; or lament, Geantriaghe, ‘the laughing strain’, here called ‘da notes o’ joy’, or dance music; and Suantraighe, and ‘the sleeping strain’ or lullaby, which the ballad describes as ‘da god gabber reel/dat meicht ha made a sick hert hale’. In Irish tradition the suantraighe makes anyone who is awake fall asleep, and anyone who is sick becomes well. He claims, and is granted Isabel as his reward, and on his return, not only his wife but his kingdom is restored to him.

    The many symbolic values encompassed by Eurydice, who represents soul, conscience, maturity, muse and social identity, as well as lover, and the different outcomes gave me a lot to play with. It gave me the opportunity to see Orpheus as many different artists – Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Thomas the Rhymer and Gerald Way from the emo-band My Chemical Romance. I could use the multi-layered tradition to examine the use of poetry – and art in general; the role of an artist in society, the way an artist integrates – or fails to integrate – the practice of his art with his personal life, the nature of love, and the very odd relationship between artist and muse. The old-fashioned exclusive language here is deliberate. Women, particularly women of my generation, negotiate this terrain differently – maybe I should try a Rumpelstiltskin or a Baba Yagar sequence next time!

    In my version, Eurydice is not dead or stolen by fairies;she is mad, and she and Orpheus are locked in a co-dependent relationship which may or may not destroy both of them. Whether either one of them gets out of hell depends on Orpheus’ willingness to come to a sound understanding of who he is, and set Eurydice free.

    This might be a good time to acknowledge the influence of my supervisor way back when I did my MLitt. Felicity J Riddy is not only a brilliant medievalist, but was also a wonderful teacher and mentor. And she wrote an essay on Sir Orfeo (The Uses of the Past in Sir Orfeo published in the Yearbook of English Studies vol6 1976) which started me on my interest in the Orpheus tradtion

  • aftermath

    It seems a long time since I put anything up here, and of course it is. Family goings on, etc. have got in the way. In a large family like mine there’s always something going on, but we did have a whole swathe of people getting ill and needing attention, and I got ill myself and so it goes.
    It hasn’t all been family and dull stuff, however. My Zen folk music poem, Sean Nos was accepted by Brittle Star and will appear next week, and I’ve put together two more submissions, which I suppose will take the usual ages to feedback. When I was at Lumb Bank I got some useful background about why magazines sometimes take so long, such that frankly, sometimes you have to be grateful that they get back to you at all. And it makes those editors – Sally Evans, Joy Hendry, Louise Hooper in my experience – you may know more – who take the time to be kind and constructive, so much more to be cherished.
    Come to think of it, good, honest accurate criticism is worth its weight in gold from whatever source. I was going to give a roll of honour, but I bet I’d forget someone. I’ll just take the opportunity to thank you, all of you.

  • poetry course Lumb Bank

    A couple of weeks ago I did an Arvon course at Lumb Bank, which I found a very challenging, but ultimately extremely rewarding experience. It was very odd to be in a house with so many other people – even Nunraw, which isn’t silent or peaceful any more didn’t make the same sort of social demands. It was also odd to be with so many people taking poetry so very seriously. You’d think the Callander poetry Festival would be the same, but it isn’t – there’s a relaxed, festive atmosphere, something to do with so many of us being friends, or with the atmosphere Sally and Ian King create, which was quite different from Lumb Bank.

    I don’t mean that it was competitive or pompous or elitist – on the contrary. Most of those who had been to Arvon weeks before remarked on how well we were getting on, and how nice everyone was. But it was very serious, and this was both strange and liberating compared with more mainstream environments where poetry is at best peripheral, if not downright irrelevant.

    Being in what felt like a very foreign country, poetically speaking, did bring out major differences between the English and the Scottish poetry scene. English poetry seems more high-brow – downright academic, in fact, at its worst, dreary, cold, contrived and cerebral. At its best it’s powerful, elegant and exquisite. It’s a sort of climax culture.From here it looks as if there’s a consensus about what they like and want from poetry, and they have evolved a system to make it more and more like that.

    Scotland, on the other hand feels like second growth scrub. Lots of weeds, lots of vigour, much more diverse and sustainable, original, slightly renegade, very much more experimental. We have much more language to play with, more different kinds of publishers and readers, much more confidence – but we could do with a bit more intellectual rigour. We have stopped looking to England for approval quite so much, and the independent voice is coming through, but our poetry needs the sort of development that traditional music has had – an awareness of the enormous potential within the form, a respect for craftsmanship and technique, and a refusal to settle for less than the best.

  • poetic adventures

    On Saturday I read at Word Power Books in Edinburgh, at a do organised by Understanding Poetry magazine. It was a very interesting night, for two reasons. One was the work of a dynamic young poet called Michael Pederson who read from his first collection, a chapbook to be published the very next day by an outfit called Koo Press, based in Aberdeen. You can see the poems he read on his web-site, and there’s a link there to Koo press, as well. Very well worth a look.
    The other one was the bookshop. I’d never been there before, and never even knew of its existence until I got the invitation. It had a brilliant selection of poetry, including magazines and pamphlets, which put even the Glasgow Borders to shame, plus the sort of radical politics of all dimensions, mythology, history, cooking and gardening books that make my teeth water. I had forgotten how exciting a radical mindset can be!

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