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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Poetry

National Poetry Day

The theme is water and today the rain has been both heavy and continuous. So I really had to post this poem! It first appeared in the 3rd issue of Drey two years ago.

The Territory of Rain
This is the territory of rain.
It is king here, more than cold or wind,
and all living is by negotiation
with flows and falls of water.

Earth and sky are heavy with it.
Peat grips it like a miser’s fist.
River runs muddy as rain sloughs
the silt from bank and hillside.
It winks between grass stems,
silvers pot-holes in the tarmac,
attacks roofs with soft persistent fingers,
slips like sorrow between slate and timber.

And yet, the heart lifts at the sound
of falling water. It ripples
and sings like a lullaby,
even when the river is at the doorstep,
even when the soaked ground
gasps for breath and roots begin to rot.

It is king here and we serve it
with macs and umbrellas,
catch its least drips in water-butts,
watch it punch small holes in ponds
delighted, even as we wish it elsewhere.

October 3, 2013
Carrying the Songs Moya Cannon

Reading this book was like coming home. The subject range is very familiar – landscape, language, home, emigration, music. There are a good number of poems I wish I’d written – Carrying the Songs, First Poetry, To Colmcille Returning, and even one, Pollen, that I swear, I was just about to write. But it wouldn’t have been as good.

Moya Cannon is a more thoughtful poet than I am, more orderly, less fidgety and compressed. And there’s more personality – by which I don’t mean self-disclosure, but more of a persona, a sense of a fully engaged mind and heart, not just observing, but responding to her observations. Her poetry is more informal and irregular than mine:
Have I stooped so low as to lyricise about heather,
adjusting my love
to fit elegantly
within the terms of disinterested discourse?
(Hills),
whihch meant I had a hard time with the metre until I read it aloud, and then was won over completely.

A sense emerges throughout the book of an irrevocable change through a rational education and emphasis on abstract thought, of a loss of capacity for faith, which leaves us withdimished means to articulate the power of landscape, home, heritage and community exerts upon us. Moya Cannon’s poetry is a magnificent attempt to redress this. Landscape and sea dominate the book – hills, wells, nests, shells, and the survivals of bones, nuts and pollen. Migration, loss and persistence shape many poems, the movement of birds, of people, of songs, and of language. The loss of language is the loss of identity (Forgetting Tulips, Murdering the Language) or relationship(No Sense in Talking). But words are carried, transformed, persist and re-emerge in place-names,(Oughterard Lemons) in local idioms(Banny), and in loan-words to other languages(Augers).
There are small unassaible words
that diminish Caesars;
territories of the voice
that intimte across generations
how a secret was imparted –
that first articulation,
when a vowel was caught
between a strong and a tender consonant
when someone, in anguish
made a new and mortal sound
that lived until now
a testimony
to waves succumbed to
and survived.
Toam

July 15, 2013
A Quick Round-up Before the Holidays

School’s out for summer! So I will be looking after Lucy a lot, and posts will be when I can get around to them. But beofre I disappear into the cake-making, flower-pressing, music-learning, story-reading, picking up and delivering to activity classes over the next weeks, I thought I’d catch up with what has been going on – there was more than I thought!

I was at the launch of the Stirling Fringe Festival on Thursday night. This has been unaccountably below the radar up till now, but it looks like a truly inventive and wide-ranging mix of artistic activity, and I’m hopeful that a new era of the arts in Stirling is about to dawn. And not before time, either. The most exciting thing about the night, however, was meeting a local artist who will be having an exhibition during the fringe, Tamsin Haggis. We had a long discussion about creativity and geo-poetics, so I am really looking forward to seeing more of her work.She has a fascinating website, which you can see here, and I’ll be posting a link in the sidebar shortly.

Creativity was also on the agenda at a reading and discussion I went to in the Scottish Poetry Library on Friday, with Christian McEwen, who wrote the very popular book World Enough and Time. She is a very nice woman, and has a lovely voice and reading style,but it did leave me rather thoughtful. Every now and again I find myself up against something that just doesn’t work for me, although everyone around me seems to love it.I don’t do well, I discover, with the notion of ‘slowing down’ and ‘wasting time’ to liberate creativity. I don’t have any bother with generating creative ideas. I do have bother turning them into useful working projects. My brain goes in fits and starts, often buzzing with way too much to do, sometimes spinning its wheels in a depressing morass of exhaustion and frustration. The trick, I’ve found, is a steady pace, enough to keep up the momentum, not so much that I lose the plot, and (horrors!) engaging the much-maligned intellect. Shifting my left brain (always a Cinderella in discussions like this) up a gear gives a project a bit of traction, and rewards the dullness of structure and habit with a satisfaction that I find genuinely liberating. Nimue of Druid Life discusses the same kind of thing here, but I’d be interested in other readers’ comments.

In addition to keeping up the momentum on the transaltion of Virgil’s Eclogues (feel a tub-thump coming on about the relationship between the state and ownership of land, but that will have to wait a week or two)and Bernard Lonergan’s Insight (I’ve hit a hard bit, there’ll be nothing about that for a good while, till I get my head round it) Cora Greenhill introduced me to the poetry of Moya Cannon. That was a real revelation. Her poetry is on much the same ground as mine, but in many ways could not be more different. I’ll be reading and re-reading Carrying the Songs a lot over the summer, and reviewing it some time in the autumn.

I haven’t been walking the territory much this year, but today I noticed that the wild roses and the elder flowers were in full bloom. My hayfever is too bad this week to be outside much, but the garden seems to be getting along without me. We are harvesting lettuce and gooseberries, and the strawberries are filling out nicely, though there’s none ripe yet. The roses are in full bloom, and the lavenders are just beginning.

The house martins nest that was raided by the gulls is full of cheeping again, so I hope that brood#2 has better luck than the first one! I was weighing up this year’s nesting season, and it doesn’t seem too bad. I’ve noticed fledglings of sparrows, dunnocks, blackbirds, greenfinches, jackdaws, great tits, mallards, goldfinches, crows and magpies – and the gulls, of sourse, now very large and mousy brown, but still roof-bound. And ospreys, though these weren’t actually on my patch, but at Aberfoyle, where you can see live pictures from a webcam in the mini lodge.

And this brings me rather breathlessly to a stop for a while. I hope to be posting over the holidays, if rather erratically, but otherwise, I will be back in august. Happy summer, everyone!

June 30, 2013
Pastoral Poetry

One of the many upheavals in the cultural world over my lifetime has been a reappraisal of pastoral poetry. In my youth pastoral poetry was regarded as an artificial and rather sentimental construct – all these highly cultivated (and presumably rich) people pretending to live the simple life and envying the happy peasant his careless poverty. The Romantics, of course were regarded as different, seeing engagement with nature as a spiritual or intellectual adventure, with no sense of wish-fulfilment or nostalgia. It was all a bit macho then, and we went in for the hidden violence in Ted Hughes’ animal poetry (that thrush, for instance, a mechanical murderer, like something out of Terminator – what were we thinking?)

Well, we weren’t entirely fair to the pastoral as a genre – though there’s something to hang onto in there; it’s awfully easy to slip into something that sounds as if it belongs in Country Living – pastoral poetry has a serious job to do, and we are in just the situation where we need it. Pastoral isn’t really about playing Marie Antoinette – a bucolic holiday for spoilt or disappointed urban readers. It is almost always written in response to a time of social and political upheaval. It is almost always about renegotiating what’s really important about human life, our place in the universe as individulas and as a species. And there is no doubt that this is what is driving so much of our writing and thinking. From geopoetics, eco-poetry, permaculture and transition, the revival of interest in crafts and slow food, to the upsurge in nature writing and deep ecology and earth-based spiritualities, we are really open to questions that pastoral poetry invites us to consider.

I’ve written before about this in Wilderness Poetry, but I’ve just started working on a translation of Virgil’s Eclogues. It will take me ages. I’ve forgotten so much vocabulary, and I was always a bit slip-shod in my translations even when I was doing it all the time,but it’s fascinating to take so much time to concentrate on the weight of each word.

Take ‘lentus’ in the fourth line of Eclogue 1, for instance. If you look it up quickly, you get ‘slow’ like in music, or ‘tough’ which are both a little bit weird in the context. If you go on (I got an enormous dictionary very cheap in a booksale at the Scottish Poetry Library) you get words like ‘fixed’, ‘inactive’, ‘lingering’. Are we insulting our rustic shepherd – slow-witted, inert, a bit thick? No, not really. Although Meliboeus is comparing his hasty flight into exile with Tityrus’ contented stay-at-home idyll, he is also talking about resilience, roots, belonging. To Virgil, as to many of us these days, stability comes with engagement with the earth; it is the foundation of a proper human life. Whether it is pleasant or peaceful or happy is not the point. There aren’t any guarantees or illusions about it. But as we get into the Eclogues we realise that in more than one way, we are ‘grounded’.

June 18, 2013
Thinking Like a Tree

These are pictures from last year, and choosing them really showed me how late everything is. This time last year the alchemilla looked like this:

and it does, just about!But in my May folder there are pictures of my iris border in full flower, and it’s only just in bud now, and all these aquilegias – barle a twinkle in the border’s eye!

Things are beginning to move very fast now. I still have the very last daffodils, the cowslips, the lily of the valley and the tulips, while the rowan and cow parsley are in flower and the sweet rocket – which may well go on all summer is begiining to show. The housemartin nests under the eaves across the river are full of noisy chicks already, though they only came back at the beginning of the month, and the first birds – the sparrows, starlings and chaffinches have fledged, and there are young greenfinches on the riverbank, while the black-backed gulls are still sitting tight on eggs.Tadpoles in the pond are large and very lively, and the magpies are courting disaster trying to fish for them – mostly without success. All the vegetables are planted out now, and the window-boxes are ready to go into place.

On the writing front, things are maturing nicely, mostly thanks to the conversations I have having with a poet I met at Wiston Hall – Cora Greenhill, which have not only moved me in a new direction, but made me more aware of the complex and multi-layered processes that go into my work – all of which should mean a bit less thrashing about in all directions trying to get moving, and a lot less settling for the quick and empty image-grab. If I’ve been a bit quiet lately, that’s mostly why. I’m having a moratorium on the whole jumping-in-with-both-feet thing, becoming less of a magpie-mind and a bit more grounded, persistent and nurturing to my ideas – more like a tree, maybe? It’s rather a pleasant process!

May 30, 2013
The Merry Month of May

As I look out of my window, May doesn’t seem so very merry. There is a mass of thick grey cloud away to the north, and a cold wind blowing intermittent rain showers at the window. Moreover, I’ve been out of action with a bad headache, and not feeling disposed to be merry at all—
However, we do seem to have turned a corner. It’s much warmer than it was, and there was at least one day of welcome sun. All the trees, even the ash and oak, are in leaf, the pear plum and cherry trees are in full bloom, and I’ve just seen the first apple blossom on my neighbour’s trees. The swallows and martins are busy, I’ve seen the first swifts, and the birds are all carrying food, not nest materials. Every time I look at my garden, I feel happier.

The productive bit of the garden is beginning to shape up too. The vegetable seeds are in, and coming on nicely and there are blossoms on the fruit bushes. Because of the current anxiety about bees,I am trying to take photos of all the bees I see in my garden, and there certainly seem to bee a lot more about this week.

They aren’t very bright! This one was trapped in the greenhouse for ages, as unlike wasps, they don’t seem to understand glass. Butterflies aren’t much better. There was a peacock trapped in there last week, as I tried to waft it towards the vent or the door without success. The warm weather brought out a lot of butterflies. I’ve seen tortoisehells and peacocks and the first whites.

And I’ve tried my hand at a more complicated sourdough mix, this time including rye and barley flour. I was really pleased with it – I can see that I’m going to have to make a lot more sourdough in the future!>

On the poetry front, I’ve been working on some of the poems I started in April, and I’m very excited by it. Having to produce so much in such a short time pushed me out of my usual range, and meeting so many good poets at the Dark Mountain Writing Weekend really helped me raise my game.

May 12, 2013
NaPoWriMo – the score card
Well, April was a busy month! As well as Easter and the Dark Mountain Writing Weekend, there was the Easter holidays and the spring garden work to contend with. All this, and NaPoWriMo too! Unsurprisingly, I didn’t make a poem a day, but I did manage 24 poems. Most are still in first draft form, and a lot of them are haikus, but still—.
Here they are:
- About to Get Lost
- After Visiting Time
- And So Today
- Anda Union
- April Rain
- Border Fells
- Buzzard Poem(s)
- Change in the Weather
- Chant for a New Start
- Dum Y At
- Grey Mug
- In the Fields
- In the Woods
- King of the Birds
- Land-Chant
- Murmuration
- Nettle Shirt
- Plantation
- Primroses
- Ruined Abbey
- Starling Walk
- The Way We Live Now
- Wind Changing
- Wood Violets
Some of them will probably be combined to form longer pieces, and at least one poem will probably develop into at least two, so the final total may be as few as fourteen, but really, that’s not bad for a busy month! The experience of doing NaPoWriMo has been a very good one, not only providing me with a lot of material to work on, but also a great confidence boost at a time when I was beginning to falter. I think the Dark Mounatin Weekend which I blogged about last time was crucial in this – I came home with the bits for ten poems out of three days! I’ll put up some pieces here, but the longer ones will be saved so I can submit them elsewhere, as even the most limited appearance here can be counted as ‘previous publication.’

Anyway, thank you to the people who organised the whole project, to the poets and family who encouraged me to take part, and especially to Jo Bell, whose prompts were unusual, imaginative and truly inspiring!
May 1, 2013
Dark Mountain Writing

Last weekend I was at the Dark Mountain Wriiting Weekend at Wiston Lodge, organised by Susan Richardson and Em Strang. Sue was someone I’d got to know via the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, and you can read some of her poetry in the new issue of Stravaig, and I’d come across Em’s work in Earthlines so that was encouraging. Then the good people of Wiston Lodge coped easily with my awkward dietary requirements, so it was aways likely to be a good experience. It was better than that, however. The peace and the structure that was set up gave me a chance to forget all the stuff happening at home, and just write; the workshops and the conversations they generated were inspiring, and I met some wonderful writers and made some excellent friends. What more could a person ask?

This is the campfire we had on the Saturday (that’s Sue in the photo). Some very exciting ideas were hatched and there will be more about them over the next few weeks and months. Several of us have blogs, and I’ll put links to them in the sidebar.

But now I’m home, and busily catching up on the garden work, the housework and all the dealings with medical services which are making up a large part of life just now. But at least spring has happened. Every day there is a new flower, a new bird (swallows arrived on Wednesday!) or new leaves of another tree. Even the hail this afternoon doesn’t seem to have stopped it. These are the latest – cowslips in my tiny woodland garden.

And I have finally achieved a long-standing ambition. I’ve baked our own bread since I was married, but sourdough has eluded me. This is my first edible sourdough loaf, and it was lovely. There are so many recipes I’m going to try now!

April 26, 2013
Rain!
Most of the garden seems to have been in suspended animation lately.I’ve been looking at the rhubarb for a month, saying “Another week will do it!” with no result. On the other hand, the primroses are thickening up nicely,

and the whole spring border seems to have made a step forward.But everything was getting very dry – an odd thing, after all the rain last year – and despite the gathering cloud, the dropping pressure and the humidity, it never rained. The wind remained in the east, and it was cold.

This morning, though the wind remains easterly, it has rained – half-hearted drizzly mist at first, but now genuinely wet stuff. I’ve just been out to water the greenhouse, and it smells wonderful!

There’s been very little gardening lately, what with the frost, my arthritis and my daughter’s illness, but I’ve been keeping up with NaPoWriMo – more or less, and so far I’ve written:
- Nettle Shirt
- Dum Y At(haiku)
- Ruined Abbey
- MurmurationHaiku)>
- Opening Autumn
- You Will Get Lost(from a prompt from Jo Bell)
- Primroses(haiku)
- Chant for SpringPrompted by Jo Bell, again
And the new issue of Stravaig is now online. I don’t have any poetry in it, but there’s an essay about my territory, and a review of last year’s Dark Mountain anthology – a beautiful book, with an awful lot to say.
April 10, 2013
NaPoWriMo Day#5

Anda Union

Music from the grasslands.
Thousands of horses
will gallop through my dreams.

I never meant to write so many haikus this month! But we’ve had to deal with an acute episode in a family health situation, and I feel very fortunate to be able to grab some quiet time to write anything at all! Anda Union is the name of a Mongolian band we heard during Celtic Connections. It was a wonderful night, not least because it took place in the Gllasgow Art Club, a venue of unbelievable elegance. Do check out the website – there are clips of their amazingly rich and complex music on it. Ever since then I have wondered how Scottish music relates to our landscape and our sense of home – wind music? rain? the sea? What do you think?

April 5, 2013

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