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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Poetry

  • 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!

  • National Deaf Youth Theatre

    I hope you enjoy this clip from the National Deaf Youth Theatre. People who know my poem Word to Sign: Translating Swallows will get some idea what it is all about now!

  • Atlantic Islands Festival

    This was a big event, which I have already mentioned on Luchair (my keyboard isn’t recognising accents this morning!), and which will have ongoing resonances with a lot of my work over the next few months.

    There was a lot of interesting work in many genres and media, but particularly impressive were Richard Ashrowan’s lovely films (see more here), and the lovely Atlantic Islands Suite, which premiered on Wednesday, and which I reviewed here.

    Now I’m home for a couple of weeks, writing slate poems and star poems and grass poems, until I go to an Arvon course in August.

  • Gillian Clarke: A Recipe for Water

    Life is too short to review books you don’t like, so you can take it as read that this is good poetry.
    It’s lucid and serene, attentive and intelligent. It deals with water as sea, snow glacier and river, and talks incisively about global warming without a lot of finger-pointing and shouting. Look at this quiet but pointed conclusion to Solstice where she makes the connection between a spendthrift extravagance of Christmas lights and global warming.

    and we’ll know, for the pleasures of here and now,
    we are borrowing bling from the glacier, slipping
    Greenland’s shoulder from its wrap of snow

    No preaching, but a lovely image for a chilling fact.

    Climate change is a hot topic, but Gillian Clarke extends her consideration of water into many other dimensions. Water, in her hands, is also language, tradition, geography, relationship, connection, transformation, currency. This is easy to read poetry, but not simple.

    There are poems about other things too, birds, plants, minerals, architecture, and one about rugby, which I never thought I would be able to read with pleasure. I bought this book for the intriguing title, but I’m loving it as much for the poems about Welsh, about fire, about horsetails.

    I was looking for something appropriate to finish this review off, but didn’t really find it until I read Jamie Whittle’s book White River, where he says “when you start studying a river, you begin to see that it is connected to everything else on the planet”.

    This is exactly the feeling I got from Gillian Clarke’s book.

  • The Neil Gunn Competion

    Not to boast, but to reveal this beautiful certificate – check those Pictish fishes!
    Seriously, though, I had a wonderful day in Inverness yesterday at the Award Ceremony for the Neil Gunn Writing Competition. It was held in the Town House, a stone building of such grace and friendliness it puts the average council offices to shame, and was a joy from start to finish. There were several categories to the competition, and special mention should go to Thurso High School which provided an impressive proportion of the secondary school winners. Then we got to the poetry. I can’t recommend highly enough James Knox Whittet’s overall winning poem Cuttings, but the others were excellent also.

    There was an excellent lunch after that, when I was able to talk to two of the other winners,Great guys, both, in very different ways) and to Jon Miller, who turned out to be the person who accepted the poems for last year’s Northwords Now.

    And then I met Katharine Stewart! I’ll write more about her on Lúcháir, I think, but she has been a favourite writer of mine for about twenty years. She is coming up to ninety-five now, and was so kind to me when Paul asked if I could be introduced, though a little bemused, I think by my enthusiasm.

    It was perfect weather, and Inverness was green and peaceful under the sun and wind. Three of us later bumped into each other at Leakey’s, The justifiably famous second-hand bookshop – how could we be in Inverness and not go to Leakey’s?

    Thanks should go to the Neil Gunn Trust for setting up the competition and to all the funders, but especially to the organiser, Area Libraries Officer Charlotte Macarthur, who was responsible for looking after everyone, making sure that the day went without a hitch, and was so helpful to everyone throughout the whole competition.

  • website down

    The company hosting my website, burnedthumb.com seems to have gone bust, taking the website with it. There will be a new one up shortly, as soon as my consultant (i.e. daughter Naomi) gets over the horrible flu she’s had.
    In the meantime, I’m preparing for a reading I’ll be giving on Sunday 5th July at the Atlantic Islands Festival . This looks like being a fabulous event – Naomi described it as ‘fantasy poets’ camp’ which is about right. The most especially interesting thing turns out to be a presentation from Jacqui McDonald about her life in folk music. Jacqui turns out to be half of the legendary folk group Jacqui and Bridie who were big in Liverpool in the early days of the folk revival, alongside the Spinners, Pete MCGovern (who wrote the Liverpool Lullaby that Cilla Black sang) and Brian Jacques who later went on to write the Redwall series of children’s books.
    Back in the day when I had delusions that I would be a folk singer, I sang in Jacqui and Bridie’s club. Can’t remember what we did for the life of me. I Once Loved a Lad, and Lizzie Lindsay, probably, or Ewan McColl and Irish rebel songs (gave up on them later when things got too serious) or drinking songs or sea shanties – couldn’t get away from them in Liverpool then. I think I played tin whistle then too. Now I only play for my grand-daughter!

  • a world of poetry

    One of these days I will have to review some of the new poetry that has fallen into my lap lately. I am a sucker for books with water in the title so I have Matthew Hollis’ Groundwater and Gillian Clarke’s A Recipe for Water, which have stunned and excited me.
    Then there was Alan Jamieson’s video poems – beautiful combinations of text and sound and image which I’d love to find a way to share.
    Then there will be the Atlantic Islands Festival on the island of Luing from 4th-11th July
    which has been organised by Norman Bissell at the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics. I don’t know how he has managed to pack so much interesting stuff into one week, but it is truly impressive, and I am looking forward very much to taking part.

  • From Wood to Ridge Sorley Maclean

    Or Somhairle Macgilleain as he would have written it in Gaelic. The book I’ve been reading is the Penguin collection of poems with a simultaneous translation From Wood to Ridge. It is beautiful and powerful, and completely gives the lie to people who see Gaelic as an archaic language only fit for conveying pastoral nostalgia, dealing as it does with love, war, and the politics of an uncompromisingly modern conflict between the personal and political.
    I confess it leaves me almost speechless. It’s always hard to evaluate a poetry that is not in its original language – you can’t be sure how much of what you are getting was in the original intention and how much has been filtered out, or imported in, by the process of translation.
    It’s possible that you can get an enriching, two poems for the price of one, by translating – as I put it in a poem called Translating Swallows ” I warm my thought at another mind’s fire.” You can see this in Seamus Heaney’s Midnight Verdict, for instance, where you get Heaney as well as Ovid and Brian Merriman – and in fact you get three, there because the juxtaposition of extract from The Metamorphoses and The Midnight Court also allows the two poems to comment on each other and create a third vision.
    But the problem with Sorley Maclean’s poetry is that it is such a powerful synthesis of poetic form, language, land and culture, that I can’t get much out of it without feeling overwhelmed by how much I’m missing. I can’t help feeling that all poetry should aspire to this.
    Here is a link to the official Sorley Maclean website.

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