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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Poetry

Lavender’s blue

Well, you’d think, wouldn’t you. But sometimes lavender can look like this – lavender stoechas, possibly ‘Avignon’

or this

Which is lavender rosea, or this

which is lavender alba. They are all flowering their lovely heads off, and I’ve taken cuttings. With luck there will be some to share with poets at the Callander Poetry Weekend, which falls this year on the 2nd to the 4th September. Usually I would be encouraging people to sign up for a reading slot, but it seems that the word is out already and there is a wonderful programme in prospect, with the usual mix of readings, book launches, performance pieces, discussion groups, and a lot of good food and conversation.

The weekend got plenty of publicity at the Callander Haiku readings last night, as many of the contributors had met, or learned about haiku at previous weekends. I can’t recommend this weekend too highly, particularly as all the events are free, so if you are new to poetry readings, it’s an easy way to dip your toe in the water.

But in the meantime, I’ve been gardening, harvesting gooseberries and redcurrants, drying oregano for the winter, and beginning to cosset the first tomatoes. The roses are in full bloom and the honeysuckle is just beginning to flower – I think the combination of warm weather and torrential rain which we’ve had this week has really suited the garden! And there are flower buds on the myrtle bush for the first time.

In the quiet of the school holidays, I’ve taken time to rethink the next phase of this blog. I have a couple of poetry projects cooking – some translations from Old English, and a LONG poem dealing with land ownership and exile, environmental neglect, femininity, wildness and poetry. I’m getting sidetracked by research into wrens, fairy tales, folk music and early monasticism, but if I can bring it off, it’s going to be enormously satisfying. I may post scraps of it here every now and then. And I’m focusing my reviews to come up with a poetics of inhabitation – more human than eco-poetry, but less anthropocentric than pastoral. But I have no doubt that there will be the same mix of territory walking, domesticity and comment as usual. I hope those of you who are kind enough to read this regularly will enjoy it.

July 22, 2016
Settle by Theresa Munoz

This book, Theresa Munoz’ first full collection, is published by Vagabond Voices, and has been attracting a fair bit of attention in the wider media, because of its timely dealing with the theme of migration. Theresa Munoz was born in Canada, but became a British citizen in 2014, and the first section of the book focuses on the process of migration and commitment to a new country. There are poems about the process of becoming a British citizen – the interviews, the vetting procedures, the infamous citizenship test (after 62 years living here, I’m not convinced I would pass it, and honestly, does every good Brit know who discovered the DNA molecule?). But the ones that speak to me are more personal – the bond with her sister renewed on a visit to the zoo, or her changed relationship to her childhood home. The Way talks of the family values that provide a continuity you desperately need as you push into unknown territory,

my Dad and I were never late,

never slept in —-

it was our way

back then, to measure our worth.

Her parents share memories of similar experiences – Twenty Two draws comparisons with her mother’s experience of leaving the Philippines at the same age Theresa Munoz came to Scotland, in Alma Mater she discovers that her father had attended the same college when he moved to Canada. And there are new connections to be made, discovering nuances in the Scottish use of language in For Me, or taking a gamble on a new home in On Arthur’s Seat,

what would happen

if I strode along stamped grass

peered over the edge

into emptiness

trusting myself to the town’s tiny lights.

The second half is concerned with the way our lives are changed by the internet, emails, facebook, selfies, google. Our network of friendships may be preserved or extended by facebook or emails, but our loneliness is reinforced – No emails from you when I check. (Wait). We have access to so much information, but also to a vast array of lies and fantasy. Our identities can be made more malleable, but perhaps less authentic. Or perhaps our laptops contain the ghosts of our real selves. These may seem bleak poems, but they have a quite humour, as in Junk, or How.

Some of these poems first appeared in the Happenstance pamphlet Close which I reviewed here. Some of them have been revised, (there are fewer very short lines) and they have gained a quiet serenity which brings their acute perception into focus. This is a mature first collection, and bodes well for Theres Munoz’ future.

May 3, 2016
What You Should Know to be a Poet

This is a post I wrote back in 2011, but I’m re-posting, because both poets have been drawn to my attention today. David Morley has just won the Ted Hughes prize for his collected poems The Invisible Gift, and Matt Merritt has just published a prose book called A Sky Full of Birds.

I pinched this title from Gary Snyders poem What You Should Know to be a Poet
which is a poem I found very inspiring when I came back to poetry (for about the fifth time – I used to describe myself as a recidivist poet). The point Snyder was making was that poetry had to be grounded in a deep understanding of the world around us, firstly the material facts, but also the way other humans feel about it and relate to it. Snyder’s poems often read easy, but they are actually very scholarly in an extraverted way that is completely different from the narcissistic complaining or self-satisfaction that tempts those of us who spend a lot of time looking inside our own heads for stuff to work with.

But then we have to think of the kind of “knowing” we are looking for. I’ve been spending some time with geek poets, mostly bird-watchers. I’m interested in birds but I hate twitchers with their ticks on their life-lists and their macho competing to see some poor creature which is only here because it’s lost. Frankly I’m only interested in people who love what they’re doing, so the geek poets really give me pleasure even before I read the poems.

David Morley is an ecologist by background, and it shows. His poems are full of exact species names (not always Latin) and technical terms, and he avoids romantic and anthropomorphic responses to the fish, dragonflies and birds he writes about. Observations are detailed
“head-butting the surface to see
at eyelash-level the whiphands of Common Backswimmers surge
and sprint, each footing a tiny dazzle to prism.”(Dragonflies)

but delighted (a perfect combination in my book). But it’s not all about the creatures. There’s a balanced debate about the conservation movement in Proserpina, and a reminder that climate change is not a new thing to the earth, however cataclysmic it feels to us, in The Lucy Poem.

This section of the book “Fresh Water” is only the first; there re two other sections dealing with Romany tales including Hedgehurst which reminds me a lot of Tim Atkins‘ Folklore, and with poems about the circus. I think I may say more about them when I’ve got into Morley’s earlier books. They deal with alienation and estrangement and take me into territory I’d like to know more about.

Matt Merritt, however, feels to be on very familiar ground. The poems are intensely visual, and his detailed knowledge and love of birds is obvious – Loons, Ringing Redstarts, and Knots, and it’s not only birds, there’s a lovely one called Hares in December – but most of the poems are about love death, memory and the mutability of human relationships. They are powerful and moving at that level, but there’s also something else going on that emerges as you see the book as a whole. There’s a lot of stuff written just now about the fallacy of humans seeing themselves as detached or separate from nature and how we need to recognise ourselves as one with it. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for Matt Merritt. There seems very little distinction between the act of living and writing – love is “written” on the sky, lives are drawn in, revised or erased across a landscape, as if humans are poems written by the earth. I like this. His writing is not just understanding but connecting.

Troy Town is an earlier book. Matt Merritt has since published a new collection called hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, and you can see some of his more recent work at his blog Polyolbion.

April 1, 2016
StAnza 2016 – The Festival of the Poetry Community
This is my poem Inhabitation. It is about a longhouse owned by the National Trust for Scotland, and if you can’t read the text, it begins: This is a longhouse, a hut/knee-deep in damp

poem text

and it is in the window of an estate agent near to several of the venues for what turned out to be an outstanding poetry festival. I know we always say this, but it does seem to get better every year —

If last year was about adventures and experiment, this one turned out to be about the feeling that poetry exists and develops in the body of a community of poets – in conversations, translations, collaborations, influences, integrations and rejections. Often we heard it said that no poet writes in isolation, and no poet is so insignificant, so neglected or forgotten that they have not had an impact on the environment in which we write.

Highlights of this year’s festival for me were many – the New Writers Showcase featuring Em Strang, Sam Tongue, Bridget Khursheed and Lindsay McGregor, the poetry breakfast where Clare Best, Andrew McMillan, SJ Fowler, Aase Berg and Justin Stephenson discussed physical and figurative bodies in their poetry, the Five O’clock verses where Andrew McMillan and Fiona Benson read from their prize winning first collections, but there was also the delight of meeting people, some not seen since last year, some known only on facebook. It is a wonderful thing to look round a packed auditorium and find friends in all the rows!

There is much to praise, from the meticulous organisation from Eleanor Livingstone and her team, who keep everything on track, and look so calm and welcoming all the time, to the pies and pastries, the space generously provided for poets to sit and talk or work between events, the books we all bought in greater quantities than we’d promised ourselves before we came – St Andrews is the only place I know where there’s empty spaces on the poetry shelves in bookshops, because the poetry all sold out. But this time there are small things that I will always remember with joy
- the German introductions to the VERSschmuggel event (and the ‘turn off your questionnaires and fill in your phones’)
- Lemm Sissay’s There You Go Again
- the gold-streaked pots in the garden of the Preservation Trust Museum
- the animation by Justin Stephenson of a poem by bpNicol during the Poetry Breakfast on Saturday
- Andrew McMillan’s yoga poem
- the image of her mother as a snake in Pascal Petit’s reading
- the creativity of people with the #derangedpoetess stickers (there may be some news about this later on)
- the smell of vetiver in the poetry and perfume exhibition
- the northern lights seen out of the car window as we went home
Thank you so much to the poets, the team, the venues, and to St Andrews. We had a ball!

See you next year!
March 8, 2016
And Other Poems

This is a poem that was born in the crucible of all last year’s drama, finishing up with the Paris bombings. It meant a lot to me, and I hoped it could find a home somewhere special.

And it has. I am very honoured that the wonderful poet and editor Josephine Corcoran has included it in And Other Poems. You can find it here:

https://andotherpoems.wordpress.com/2016/01/15/stand-in-the-light-by-elizabeth-rimmer/

Some of the musical references might need an explanation. There’s more to pibroch (Scottish pipe music) than laments, and more to canto jondo than confrontation with death, but laments and death songs are frequent within the genre. Nanha is an ancient Islamic musical form of a lament for the fallen, and tanakh is a metrical form which occurs in the Psalms, defined on Wikipedia as ‘an outcry from those who have lost everything’.

Thank you very much, Josephine, for finding it such a hospitable home.

January 15, 2016
In the Margin by AC Clarke

In the Margin
Published by Cinnamon Press ISBN 978-1-909077-95-9
I have always liked AC Clarke’s poetry. It’s clever, detached, witty, observant and meticulously crafted. But in this collection, something seems to have happened. The subjects are familiar – the small grotesque creatures, obscure characters from history or and objects from museums are still here, wild children, marginal illustrations from manuscripts, the mystic Margery Kempe and the fortune teller Mother Shipton – and the wry sideways glances at the darkness behind conventional exteriors. There are the same incisive descriptions:

spinal bones
like necklaces of tiny
cotton reels
(Ode to Tinned Salmon)
Or
The Tyne’s a black strip flecked
With random lights
(Haddock and Chips)

but we are on more familiar territory, with poems to tinned salmon (whose severe description of the tehnicolour flesh sprinkled with vinegar and doused with salad cream) is softened by nostalgic affection and the memory of shared celebrations) train tickets, nights in pubs and bus journeys.
There’s a lightness in the metre, a bit more movement and heft in the way the lines dance or strut in the four poems about Margery Kempe, and gentler reflection in the observation of Velasquez’ Old Woman Cooking Eggs (which I think is my favourite of these poems, though perhaps not the most interesting). AC Clarke has always had a fine line in anger and irony, and a dry sense of humour, but there is both more passion and more ambiguity in these poems. I am endlessly fascinated by the relationship described in Haddock and Chips, by the transformation of the censorious woman in Enlightenment, and the merriment of Pandemonium.
The central section of the book is a sequence of poems about the progress of a love affair set against the backdrop of terrorist violence, and the first and last sections mirror each other, featuring poems about love, death, wildness, and education. Both finish with poems about poetry and its role in the life of both poet and audience – The Poem and At the Reading. Together they create a manifesto which seems appropriate to a poet hitting new heights.

January 13, 2016
Haggard Herbs

I think this is lesser skullcap, which I found growing wild on a grass verge near the local cinema. It’s on a narrow strip of land above a steep bank down to the river, too narrow for anyone to build on, and I’ve found plants there I’ve never seen anywhere else. In parts of Ireland, the word ‘haggard’ describes just this sort of place. Originally it derives from the old Norse ‘hæɡərd’ meaning a small enclosure near a farmhouse where crops were stored, but later it was used to mean the small scraps of land, too small for farm-scale cultivation, where the poor were allowed to grow potatoes for themselves, and later again, land that had been allowed to run wild. I also noticed, when I googled the ON word, that it is now a fictional Irish city which features in a series of apocalyptic fantasy novels, but moving on —-

Actually, that isn’t too far off where I was going with this post. When I was trying to describe the next phase of my writing (both about herbs and about poetry) I caught myself saying that when things get a bit apocalyptic, people start getting into herbs. So things must be fairly apocalyptic just at the moment, wouldn’t you think? The word ‘apocalypse’ might be too strong, but there is a serious disenchantment with the political, economic and social structures of modern life on many levels. There’s a reaction to the way we work at jobs we don’t like for the money to buy goods we need to make up for the time we don’t have; or the way we have to medicate the problems brought on by the life we are expected to live; or the way our lives are constantly being tweaked to suit the systems we set up to make things simpler; or the way shedloads of information we don’t have time to absorb are being thrown at us as a substitute for actually getting to make decisions for ourselves; or the way ‘aspirations’ are distracting us from observations of how life actually is. (This post is turning out a lot more ranty than I expected.)

Last time there was so much going on with herbs was back in the seventies when we had the energy crisis, the three-day week, riots on the streets, the threat of petrol rationing and the imminent collapse of life as we know it (little did we know!). People reacted with the self-sufficiency movement, the slow food movement, the alternative therapy movement, and a whole swathe of folksy picture books teaching you how to make herb teas, pot pourri, candles with dried flowers stuck on them, and nettle soup. Since then cookery has got more serious, herbal medicine has got more scientific (at least at its best), and the herbal beauty industry has got way more commercial. But there’s still an alternative, romantic, recusant vibe about herbs.

It happens often. When St Bernard got sick of how overdeveloped monastic life had got under the regime of Cluny, and he took his followers off to start the Cistercian order, one of his ideals was that the monks should stop going to expensive doctors who prescribed elaborate medicines, but should use ‘simple green herbs’ like the poor did. When the Irish monks went to their hermitages they wrote poems about the herbs they found in the surrounding forest. In the Bible a dinner of green herbs is a life of integrity, as opposed to the rich food and intrigues of the kings palaces. And it is certainly happening now. We are looking to the wild plants of the hedges and the haggards, not just for food, medicine and comfort, but for something symbolic.

The other thing we turn to is art. Of all sorts. Theatre in the prisoner of war camps in the second world war, murals in Northern Ireland, dance in Palestine, and music everywhere – the blues, canto jondo, protest songs of all sorts. And poetry. I wouldn’t have said this twenty years ago, because the intellectual energy seemed to be elsewhere, but it’s certainly back now. People are writing, reading and sharing poetry in ways they haven’t done for years. Poetry is beginning to reflect the lives outside the academic enclosure, use different dialects and registers, take on concerns and experiences that would have been seen as ‘unpoetic’. Poets are no longer cloistered and privileged beings who don’t get their hands dirty, or who need to be protected from the harsh world of ‘real life’, they are in it, activists, carers, fundraisers and recorders of what is happening around us. And people are beginning to see poetry as part of the process of tackling the problems of our lives. What’s named can be mended.

So both sides of my writing life are in the haggards – the wild outside places, where we might find new ways of coming to terms with the hard places of life, both practical and artistic. It’s a very interesting place to be.

S

January 8, 2016
Happy Christmas

Christmas
The alchemy of myth –
the stars and angels, the earth’s
return to light, green ivy,
the quickening sap in the tree’s
deep heart, the cattle
kneeling in frosty fields,
the robin’s song at midnight –
all refined to the bare particular
fact of a birth –
that night, that inn, that boy.

December 25, 2015
Reading at Writers in the Bath

Here we are, Cora Greenhill and me, just after the reading at the Writers in the Bath event Cora organises every month in the Bath Hotel in Sheffield. The room is small ( but some of the best events are in small rooms – the bookshop in Callander, and Platform Poetry in Ladybank spring to mind), and the audience was warm and friendly – and full of talented poets.

This is Claire Carter, who may not be so well known as a poet, but who will certainly soon be very well-known as a film-maker, as her debut film, Operation Moffat received a Special Jury Mention at the Banff Mountain Film Competition. Her poetry is highly finished, complex, allusive and visual, and based in landscape, because she is a cyclist as well as a mountain climber. It seems unbelievable that she is as yet unpublished.

Here are poets from Derbyshire Stanza, (from left to right) Linda Gould, Cora Greenhill and Alison Riley, about to read from their anthology, A Place of Wonder, (published by Templar Poetry). The group has spent two years writing poems based in the twelve distinct areas of Derbyshire and has produced a book that will be cherished by anyone who knows and loves the county.

This is Sally Goldsmith, a singer-songwriter and broadcaster, who writes songs and poems and radio pieces about the history and people of the Peak District.

It was a delight to be in such company and to find that the English poetry scene has room for the diversity and the groundedness in local areas and communities I take for granted here in Scotland. By this I don’t mean simply ‘accessibility’ (for which many people read, disparagingly, ‘amateur’) or ‘folk’ poetry (for which people may also read ‘nostalgia’), but a high-quality, living and versatile response to the life of a region, beyond the merely local history and dialect, that resolutely demands more from poetry than can be reached by the more academic works of the mainstream publishers.

I should not have been so surprised, however, since I heard Liz Berry read from her outstanding Black Country at the end of October (published by Chatto and Windus, and, quite rightly, garnering a whole raft of awards). Poetry does seem to be alive and well, and finding new ways and places to grow.

Thank you to everyone who was at the Bath last week, the poets and listeners, the lovely people who bought books, and especially to Cora, who fills the room with her warmth and enthusiasm.

November 16, 2015
Under a Spell Place by Paula Jennings

I went to the launch of this pamphlet on Sunday, in the Word Power Bookshop in Edinburgh. I love that shop – it has so many of the books you can’t find anywhere else, and they put on an awful lot of poetry events so I feel very much at home there. And they host the Radical Book Fair in the Out of the Blue Drill Hall in Leith, which has events like the launch of Kathleen Jamie’s new collection The Bonniest Companie, talks by Jay Griffiths and Andy Wightman, films and writing workshops. An event not to miss!

However, I really want to say something about Paula Jennings work. For several years she has worked with people suffering from dementia and become interested in the surprising insights and creative communication that can arise out of it. In particular she worked alongside a woman named as Jean, who seemed to have lost most of her language skills, and, on the surface, to be quite incoherent. And yet, with deeper acquaintance, Paula Jennings found strong ideas and opinions, and this pamphlet is a way she has found to make Jean’s words more accessible to a wider readership.

I was intrigued by this, and also ready to be upset, as my mother has vascular dementia, and her losses of skills, knowledge and continuous memory are considerable. I recognised what Paula Jennings had to say about the conflation of past and present, and about the strange connections between widely different subjects – the sort of leaps and connections we make in dreams, or between sleep and waking – and the way Jean seems to hold down her fugitive ideas like a tent in a gale, with any rocks of words she can lay her hands on (in my poem Away with the Fairies, which is inspired by, but not about, my mother, the woman uses the phrase ‘the whole concern’ in the same way).

So far, so worthy. But the poems do not feel ‘worthy’. Paula Jennings has worked with Jean’s words just enough to give them structure and build up resonances. She does not over-interpret, or explain, or impose a poet’s or carer’s viewpoint. Jean’s personality, her humour, her affections and her priorities are allowed to make their own way in what emerge as powerful, insightful and moving poems.Some of the poems are addressed to a toy dog, which Jean spoke to in order to express ideas which might have proved difficult to articulate directly:

Yes, you’ve got to speak to ladies very nicely.

Yes, you’ve got to eat.

No, you’ve got to drink.

We’ve got to get your nose wiped
but we don’t know whether you’re there
or who you are.

There are memories of hill-walking and observations about birds and animals seen from the garden. There are occasional moments of self-awareness or recognition. This pamphlet, which is published by Happenstance might be a difficult read, but its integrity and sensitivity give its subject a dignity that is much needed.

I was delighted to hear that Under a Spell Place is to form part of the research material used in developing care for dementia sufferers in Scotland.

October 13, 2015

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