When I was translating the Old English Charm of Nine Herbs, someone talked about writing a modern one, and I took it as a dare. This year I have been out and about in the haggard – a strip of land between the road and the river, and now you can see them all.
A Charm of Nine Haggard Herbs
We are nine, a triple trinity of leaf and flower and fruit, a gift to blood and bone and breath.
Elder is first, the gift of summer, white flowers to clear the skin and banish cold from heart and lungs.
Hawthorn is home to birds and fairies. Its flowers smell of death, but its berry is good to strengthen heart and veins.
Though yarrow’s flower is small and dull, its feathery leaf is used for staunching wounds, its bitterness heals and mends the skin.
Clover, beloved of bees and sweet as a loved girl’s footprints, is remedy for coughs, and quickens growing plants.
Comfrey, with its deep roots, its strong leaf growth, mends bones, and brings up deep-lying minerals in the soil.
Dandelion, the piss-a-bed kidney herb, has power to cleanse, to bring down the over-mighty, encourage what is sluggish.
Wild rose, bright baubles on its thorny stem for winter sweetness, calm, and strength against fevers and grief of heart.
Plantain is used to clear poison. Rub the leaf to soothe the bites and stings of insects. It is so low underfoot, yet mighty.
Bramble, a tangle of thorn, and things
that buzz and sting, its dark and glowing
berries are the joy of autumn.
We are nine, we are closer than you think
in the wild and unregarded places in between.
We are haggard, and we survive.
I keep saying I’ve finished the herb poems, and they still keep coming. In today’s Atrium you will find the one about costmary – the long grey-green leaved one in the centre, just behind the lavender stoechas. This picture might be familiar – it is one of the headers on the site, and the source for the silhouette on my business cards. Atrium is one of the best on-line poetry journals going, and I’m very flattered by being published there. I’m very fond of the poem too – it was longlisted for the Poetry Society competition on its first outing, which was a great honour.
You can find out all about the project on the website, and even see the digital version, but I promise you, you’ll want the actual book. My poem, The Herb for Nightmares, is in it, and I was there to read it, along with Bradley Fairclough, who wrote about a fungus called cramp ball, which could smoulder gently for days, and was used to carry fire on long journeys, and Josh Armstrong, the director of the project. It was a very stylist event, sponsored by Botanist Gin, which formed the basis of some very classy cocktails. I don’t drink, so I had the soft version – a hawthorn blossom soda – it was amazing! I have never really like elder flower cordial, but I can see myself making one with hawthorn blossom next year. There was gorse, nettle and rhubarb too, all concocted by Josh, which I might have to try sometime too.
You can find out all about the project on the website, and even see the digital version, but I promise you, you’ll want the actual book. My poem, The Herb for Nightmares, is in it, and I was there to read it, along with Bradley Fairclough, who wrote about a fungus called cramp ball, which could smoulder gently for days, and was used to carry fire on long journeys, and Josh Armstrong, the director of the project. It was a very stylist event, sponsored by Botanist Gin, which formed the basis of some very classy cocktails. I don’t drink, so I had the soft version – a hawthorn blossom soda – it was amazing! I have never really like elder flower cordial, but I can see myself making one with hawthorn blossom next year. There was gorse, nettle and rhubarb too, all concocted by Josh, which I might have to try sometime too.
It’s been a miserable week for rain – though the garden needs it! But if the sun comes out tomorrow, I’m going to pick thyme for drying, before I go the the Red Squirrel Press launch of Peter Jarvis’ Land the Colour of Heat and Helena Nelson’s Branded in the Scottish Poetry Library, at 3 pm – later than usual, because of another booking. It doesn’t matter how much of this poetry stuff I do, I still seem to be all about the herbs!
I’m fairly grieved by what I see on social media just now, as many genuinely well-meaning people find their concerns polarised and misused to demonise other people. The story of Noah’s Ark is only one iteration of the myths about a great flood – traces of which can still be found by archaeologists. I’m finding the symbol of the ark leads me in many directions, but this is the one for today.
Ark 2 And how could they believe it, those ancient societies – a floating box, with all those animals, the food enough for all of them, and the extended family, and servants, all squabbling no doubt, and the questions of which would get to eat which? And how would it float? Yet every culture had it, the record of a great flood still seen in the soil, and a story of a box holding the seeds and survivors, renewing the earth. Somewhere we believe that when the worst happens there will be a shelter, a covenant with our God, a safe haven for all of us, both clean and unclean, and what we think of as goodness will save us, send us a rainbow, shelter us all.
This poem first appeared in Penning magazine, produced by Scottish PEN
Not everyone will be celebrating Easter – some faith traditions have their own festivals now, and a lot of people just have a holiday. But I wish you all a very happy weekend.
Here we are at the launch of Charlie Gracie’s first novel To Live With What You Are. I was lucky enough to get an early copy, and I can tell you that it is a beautifully written account of the lives of two thoroughly dark characters. How he manages to make them so understandable, and to convey their darkness so completely without using the kind of language that would give you nightmares I don’t know. It has a delicate precision and careful balance, so you’re dragged into places where you would rather not be before you notice.
As you can’t really see, it was a well-attended event, full of friends and family and writing buddies from our shared experience with Stirling Writers. There were spiced orange squirrel cookies – a flavour I was very pleased with – and fig rolls because they feature in the novel, and we talked about poetry and prose, and where they overlap and how they differ, and about haggards and wild places, and I’ve made a date to go and see the wild angelica on Thornhill Common with illustrator (she’s worked with David Bellamy) and children’s book author Jill Dow who lives there and are inspired by it. There are more herb poems to come! We sold lots of books, which was very welcome.
And while I think about it, may I remind you that you can buy my books from the shop on this site (if you don’t like using Paypal get in touch and I’ll sort out another payment method), or from the brand new shiny Red Squirrel Press website. Neither Red Squirrel Press nor I charge for postage within the UK, but if you are further afield, please email and I’ll check the postage to where you are.They also appear on the Waterstones database, so you should be able to get them from there, and you can also get Wherever We Live Now and The Territory of Rain on Amazon.
There will be a newsletter going out shortly to all my subscribers, with news of something I’m going to try from March next year. I had a Facebook group called Herbs and Poetry, and this has gone a bit quiet lately, but I thought I might do some herbs and poetry newsletters, with a herb of the month, and a poetry prompt and short discussion related to it. Please sign up to the newsletter if you’d like to get it.
This blog piece is quite late as I had two days out of action with some virus or other, so a lot of garden jobs and dye jobs did not get done. But it did give me some quiet time to think more about the next random writing projects. Several conversations about the past have triggered memories of all sorts, some nostalgic and pleasant, some painful, some reassuring as I realise that I’ve been carrying quite unnecessary feelings of responsibility for things that happened – very little out of the ordinary.
But it made me think about traditions – our accepted story about our lives, and the small random fragments that shape it. And how selective memories are. I started thinking about the things I don’t remember, not things that have slipped my mind but come back when prompted, not things I can’t remember, and have to be prompted, but things I look at and refuse, like a book on a shelf that I won’t open. It’s a strange sensation, as is the one where the memory falls open off the shelf and I’m in it.
I’m not writing about those memories – at least not yet. But I am writing about that phenomenon. It ties up nicely with the colour poems, the dyeing, the textiles poems, and a strand I’m cooking up about my grandmothers, the ones who took a stand about female education and the one who died before I was born, who survives only in her needlework.
This is partly a memoir of a war-time and post-war childhood, a period which seems very remote now, even if you were alive then (which I only just was, having been born in 1954, early enough to have a ration card, but too late to remember it), and impossibly different in many ways from the one we live in now. It was far from the golden age of allotments, home-baking and hand-knitted jumpers, and seaside holidays like the ones in the Enid Blyton books advertisers and brexiteers seem to believe. It was an era characterised by war-time shortages and a long period of austerity afterwards, by restrictions and discomfort, by a lingering fear of death and terrible, because unspoken, anxieties and by a dangerous emphasis on compliance and deference that left bullies in charge, and children isolated and unprotected.
I said yes. You always said yes to grownups
All this is evoked in this short pamphlet. A.C. Clarke turns an unsparing eye on the past of her family, the death of her baby sister, the discord, social aspirations and sibling rivalries
I see myself squat as a monolith
blocking your light, you cold in my shadow.
Brother
She revives unerringly that childhood sense of being small in a grownup world that didn’t feel it necessary to explain, but simply changed things at will – houses, regulations, brothers (a half-brother arrives out of nowhere, and later disappears without explanation). The cold houses, the stodgy, unimaginative food, the uncomfortable clothing
Liberty? What generations
were prisoned in your sturdy cotton
like chickens trussed for the pot!
Liberty Bodice
are evoked without drama, as the everyday facts they were, not period props. Coronation Day gets a mention, of course, but without nostalgia – the day is not one of pomp and celebration, but tedium, and the exhausted attempt to behave properly:
The children clutch paper flags.
They wait and wait. no-one moves out of line
though dizzy with heat. At last
a long procession of limousines.
The children wave their flags. Perhaps
they raise a cheer.
4
When I went to the launch, there were several people of my generation, and the reading sparked conversations that we hadn’t had before. Our parents, almost universally, had been reluctant to talk about the war, but all the playground games were of soldiers and nurses, fighter pilots and escaping prisoners. We remembered blackout curtains and flat irons, the terrible smogs and the nursery food, of course. But now we began to ask ourselves how our parents had coped with the hardships and traumas of war, how it had changed the dynamics of our family lives. It’s not often you get a book so thought-provoking, so revealing, and yet with A.C. Clarke’s meticulous craft and control. It was a joint winner of the Cinnamon pamphlet competition, and well deserves its prize.
This year’s StAnza had all the usual good things, friendly welcome, brilliant poetry, buying too many books, fish supper at the Tail End, the lovely town of St Andrews, mercifully free of the beer festival this year and meeting so many old friends and making some new ones. This year had its individual aspects however.
The first was the snow. The thaw was well and truly under way by Wednesday, but there were still scoops of snow along sheltered roadsides and behind hedges, and great mounds along some roads where snow had been ploughed and left in heaps that melted very slowly. But it had caused havoc with the meticulous preparation that is a hallmark of StAnza. Training sessions for the many wonderful volunteers who make it run so smoothly had had to be cancelled, and the welcome packs with all the information and schedules couldn’t be assembled in good time and had to be sent out by email.
But did we notice? Not at all. By the time we got there, everything was assembled, and there were familiar faces ready to answer questions, information packs all stacked at the Festival desk, and the Box Office on top of their game. The restaurant had the system with meal vouchers down pat this year, so there weren’t the hiccoughs that sometimes happened in previous years.
There were many highlights – brilliant readings by so many poets – Lyn Moir, Tara Bergin and Martin Figura stood out especially for me – Martin Figura’s Doctor Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine was funny and affectionate, enhanced but not overwhelmed by the sound and technical add-ons, the #Metoo reading, the Sinead Morrissey lecture, the exhibitions and the Poet’s Market, where small presses showed that it’s not all about the big publishers, and much more.
Judith Taylor, me, Colin Will
However, the big thing about this StAnza for me was that Red Squirrel Press had a showcase and I was in it! Red Squirrel poets Judith Taylor and Colin Will and I all had recent publications, so we were the poets chosen. You can see us in the photograph above, but you can’t see how dwarfed I was by that Provost’s chair. My feet didn’t touch the floor and I felt a bit like Tyrion Lannister sitting in it.
Sheila Wakefield
Sheila Wakefield introduced us, as our publisher. Sheila is such a powerhouse of publishing, they should really wire her into the National Grid, and in only a little more than ten years, has published almost two hundred titles. Here she is looking unusually calm and collected!
Judith Taylor
Judith was up first, fresh from a reading at a school in Newport, with a powerful set, including Incomer which includes the title poem of her book Not in Nightingale Country and Raven, Stac Polly, which I particularly like. The mic caught every nuance of her reading, and it was very impressive.
Then I was up. I had tried to mix things up a little, but somehow the book fought back, and I finished up as usual, with the last bit of The Wren – In the Silence of Our Hearts. One nice thing that happened afterwards was that someone complained I hadn’t read her favourite, Instructions to the Laundrymaid, which was a pity, because I had cut it out, because I was afraid I would chat too much between poems. I like that people have favourites!
Because it was the day after International Women’s Day, I read the Valiant Woman passage from The Wren in the Ash Tree, and name-checked our own Valiant Women, Eleanor Livingstone and Annie Rutherford, without whom StAnza could hardly happen at all, and certainly wouldn’t be the thing of beauty it is, and Sheila, without whom we certainly wouldn’t have been in it!
Colin Will
Colin finished up with poems from The Night I Danced With Maya, his fifth from Red Squirrel Press, including poems on subjects that ranged from Miley Cyrus’ Wrecking Ball (Deconstruction) to a Tibetan monastery, (Kumbun) and summed up his outlook in Wonky
left-leaning, following
the lie of the land.
It was a fairly terrifying experience, but no-one could have done more to make it a success than the StAnza team, from Matthew Griffiths and the sound technicians and liaison workers who kept everything running smoothly. Thank you so much to all of you!
#MeToo – rallying against sexual assault and harassment
a women’s poetry anthology
Edited by Deborah Alma
This first response to the #metoo protest last year is not what I expected. In a counter-intuitive way it reminds me of Black Panther, in that its primary impact is not the big obvious issue, but the unusual experience of hearing the people concerned talk about it among themselves, in the way they want to talk. It is a wide-ranging, reflective, steadying read, though by no means an easy one. The poems in it were written not merely in reaction to recent events but composed over a long period, and it contains some which have been published before – but really, we should have expected that. Abuse is not a recent phenomenon, the protests of women are not evidence of a ‘new puritanism’, or a revisionist criminalisation of everyday behaviour. The lives of women worldwide and over many generations have been shaped not only by individual acts of aggression, but also by the long silence, denial, indifference, blame and collusion that prevented us from understanding just how much abuse women have to deal with. In a terse, carefully controlled and understated three blunt lines, Sarah Doyle sums it up
Enough tears. Enough silence. It was all of us but we
never knew. Sisters, take my hands, we can say it together:
me too,
me too
me too.
#Metoo Sarah Doyle
The anthology ranges over the whole gamut of experience, impact and outcome – not just violence, but gaslighting, threats, manipulation, guilt and fear. In Parental Guidance by Sue Hardy Dawson it asks what we should tell our daughters to keep them safe, without destroying their trust. It asks about the consequences to the next generation in Louisa Campbell’s What You Do When Your Child is Born of Rape. Emma Lee recreates the dangerous landscape of an ordinary walk home in The Landmarks Change When You Walk Home. Poems like It Didn’t Mean Me by Gill Lambert discuss our right to name our experience, and the consequences of doing so, Before Myra by Angela Topping or not as in Keynote Speech by Angi Holden.
The abusers referred to in this book are not only men, and the abuse is not only sexual. The poems are not only angry or distressed. Vasiliki Albedo’s Why I Didn’t Marry Him holds a masterly balance as she paints a picture that is equally generous to both sides of a relationship with two faces, one genuinely loving
He toured 47 apartments with me when I was thinking of moving,
and never complained when I didn’t.
Because he invented his own language, and taught me.
and the other terrifying
If he were not the one who settled his debts by poaching
my father’s watch, or who jumped
over the gate and wouldn’t leave when I called the police.
Poems may be simply done with all of this:
With my armoured finger separator
It was just so tiresome to have to do
Me Too. Me Too. Me Too.
Just One Example Jemima Laing
or sarcastic:
I put away my heart and the stillness inside.
I smile and say so what do you do tell me again and
how many kids do you have remind me again of your wife.
I Have Been a Long Time Without Thinking Kim Moore
They may be resilient:
I grew a thicker skin, got more guts,
clearer vision. Sharpened the points of my horns.
The Inequity of Goats Stella Wulf
or defiant like the two girls hiding in their tent with their pen-knives while strange men prowled outside in Jean Atkins Travelling.
Poets have written less in anger or self-pity than out of compassion for sisters abused in childhood, friends or colleagues whose situations we failed to understand or address, women we meet professionally who may be walking into disasters we can’t prevent or have crafted ways of surviving we admire and celebrate.
The greatest benefit of this long gestation is that these are mature and well-crafted poems, handling their load of grief without melodrama or self-pity. Poems like An Ancient Settlement, I Have Been a Long Time Without Thinking, Fidget and Wildwood will stay with me for a long time. The collection has been carefully curated to move through difficult territory without overplaying its hand, and its final section, Make for the Light, with its poems of healing, consolation and survival sounds a triumphant conclusion.
There are millions of seeds in pots and jam jars,
spilling from mouths of paper bags
one for each minute of each day lost,
copses, forests, wildwood
falling through my fingers
I reach for the hands of my children, my sisters,
our dormant stories stir in earth
make for the light
Wildwood Deborah Harvey
But as Jess Phillips points out in her foreword, it is the sense of sisterhood that drives the collection:
Our sisterhood makes us want to stand together, it makes us feel the pain of another on a familiar path. Our sisterhood created #metoo and it was in the comfort of someone else’s bravery, nudging us to pass it on.
we stand together, each one a Spartaca
no longer silent or alone: each voice stronger,
massing, alive, a wild murmuration
of me too/me too/ me too
Spartaca Pippa Little
Please come to the reading from this anthology at StAnza on Thursday 8th March 6:15 – 6:45. Tickets are free, but you can now book them here.
Every time I submit a manuscript, I resolve to keep going and not lose momentum while I the poems go through the proofing, editing, printing and turn into a book. I have sometimes written some new poems, often come up with new projects, planned translations and so on. But you can’t outrun it, so now I am embracing the fallow period.
There are three more readings, one at StAnza, (and I can’t tell you how exciting that is!) and two in Glasgow which I will talk about later, because they aren’t until May. There are four editing jobs including Stravaig 6, which is going through the system just now, which will take me until at least the end of July. But new writing? I’m not sure.
With Haggards, I seem to have come to the end of one particular cycle. There are scraps and loose ends, and a sense that new paths may be about to open up, but not yet. Though in one way, I served a long apprenticeship to poetry before I started, it was quite unconventional, and there are gaps in my knowledge and practice I want to fill, experiments to try – and so much reading to catch up with.
Here is the first sample, books given to me for my birthday, some I bought with birthday book tokens, and a couple I treated myself to. I’m feeling rather lucky. As we dig in for the duration of this dramatic weather, I’ll be lighting fires, making soup, baking cakes with my grand-daughter who is having a snow day and frankly, having a ball.
I’ll post some reviews as I go – the first being #Metoo – a magnificent anthology edited by the wonderful editor and original Emergency Poet, Deborah Alma, which is going to have a launch reading at StAnza on Thursday 8th March at 18:15. Look out for this next week!
What a weekend! It was a cold day, but lots of wonderful people came to The Scottish Poetry Library for the launch of Haggards. My brother came from Preston, all my family left their usual Saturday things, friends from Perth and Cupar Angus, poets and geopoeticians.
Sheila Wakefield said some very kind things, and I read a lot of poems. I love to do this, and it made my day when people said they liked it – reading aloud where other people can hear me is a hard-won skill.
We ate almost all the cookies, and people bought books, and we all went to the Serenity Cafe next door for tea and cake.
Now the book is out there in the world, and you can buy it from the Red Squirrel Press website, or from the new shop on here – postage is free to the UK. It costs £10.
Thank you to Sheila Wakefield, my publisher, to Gerry Cambridge who designed the cover, which everyone loves so much, to everyone who came, to those who bought books, to those who shared the event on social media – I’m overwhelmed by the kindness people have shown me – and those who have posted supportive comments since.
