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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

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  • The Absolute State of Poetry These Days

    As a one time reviewer who used to be praised for my honesty, I think I should probably declare that reviews in Northwords Now et al under the name of Elizabeth Rimmer are not those attributed to Ishbell O’Sullivan in this article
    https://www.rlf.org.uk/showcase/the-round-lovely-ones/?fbclid=IwAR0Bwd3EcnegI6H9g2mCdO_Gdn2eQmgC5M5FnT08uch5ljkC0L1KSWGB6z

    though I’m fairly sure I was enough of a nippy sweetie to please Gerry Cambridge. No, they were by me, and I still don’t like Robin Robertson’s work, although I do admire his skill.

    I disagree with a lot of what Gerry Cambridge has to say, both about reviewing and about poetry at large, though I do see where he is coming from, and it has made me a think about the function of reviews, and why I do it. I don’t review so much these days, I don’t even write as many reviews on this blog as I would like, and reviews of any sort, and particularly poetry reviews, are hard to find anywhere. Neither Haggards nor The Well of the Moon have ever been formally reviewed, and though it hasn’t done sales any harm (would you mind if I casually mentioned that Haggards is being reprinted for the third time?) I think it would be nice to get more extended feedback than the comments I’ve had which were kind and insightful, and not solely complimentary.

    I do miss good extended poetry criticism. It isn’t generally taught in academia, and a lot of tutoring focuses on the creative and technical side of writing – no bad thing in itself, but it leaves a gap, a feeling that there isn’t a broad overview of a poetry scene that is busy extending itself in all directions. Newspapers and journals don’t publish many reviews, and pay for even fewer, so those of us who do it are doing it for love, focussing on what we’ve liked, and neither writers nor readers have time to waste on books which waste our time.

    So why do it at all? It doesn’t have any impact on sales, and it isn’t just to make friends and influence people. Firstly, to record the poetry that I’ve read and loved and want to go back to. So much poetry is published now that it’s very easy to read a good poem and like it, and then forget it instantly. When you come across something that really matters, you want to flag it up, not only for yourself, but for everyone else trying to filter the onrush of new books, pamphlets and journals.

    Often I write to try and understand what I liked about it, how it influences my thinking and develops my writing practice. Under this heading comes the analysis of the poets who hit that concept, image, technique I’ve been searching for, or that writer who shares my passions and instincts, that I want to have a conversation with. I don’t always agree with these poets, but they fascinate me.

    Often I want to have a conversation with friends and readers about what I’ve read, and let me tell you, you get more engagement if you have something positive to say than if you start by describing Rilke as the Jacob Rees-Mogg of poetry – which I did do once. I don’t believe in indulging silliness, pretentiousness or shoddy work, but a wanton display of savagery to amuse readers is no more likely to encourage honesty than a focus on the good stuff – and there’s plenty of that about. Let me share my treasures with you – I may get a bit excitable, but trust me, you will find something you like.

  • Reading the Hill

    I meant to post a couple of blogs between now and the last time but got distracted. Writing seems to have taken a back seat, as life has been busy with editing, admin, some live poetry events at last, and some long overdue family time.

    Reading, however, has happened apace. I am still discovering more about the history of this territory, thanks to some Twitter connections I made in October. (That sort of thing will be so much harder if Twitter really falls apart, as it looks as if it might.) There has been an awful lot of fighting here, it seems. Gang warfare didn’t start with the ice cream! But I’ve also discovered some excellent poetry and other stuff I’d like to share.

    Marsh, River, Raft, Feather by Clarissa Álvarez and Petero Kalulé, an innovative collaborative work published by Guillemot Press, that extends the range of poetic form and thinking about landscape. I will have to re-read this one a couple of times to get the full extent of its fascination.

    Subterranea by Jos Smith (Arc) which takes poetry underground into the geology and archaeology of South-west England. Uneven, but beautiful.

    Weeds in the Heart by Nathaniel Hughes and Fiona Owen (Aeon). This is not your usual herbal – it describes itself as a ‘sensory’ approach to herbal healing and interaction, which makes a lot of sense to me (as anyone who has been to one of my workshops will know!), but which is being made popular by the Seed Sistas at the Hackney Herb Garden. It includes a lot of psychotherapy in its information, but its real appeal to me is in the map, which connects plants and place and people in a beautiful visual way.

    Belonging: a Culture of Place by bell hooks (I like the statement those lower case names make!) It is published by Routledge but they seem to have done a shocking job of proof editing, so it might be worth finding another edition. This book brings together a lot of things I’ve been trying to say for years, but from the perspective of black small-holders in Kentucky, which makes me aware of dimensions of place writing that writers of place and environment really need to take on board, even here in Britain where relationships and access to land and indigeneity seem so very different. Like many people, I wasn’t really aware of bell hooks until she died, but I will be diving in to as many of her books as I can get.

    This website is going to get a bit of a refresh and future-proofing, and I’m very excited about its new look. One of the lovely things it will have is a Zotero plugin, so I can give you links to all these good things easily. When the relaunch is done, I will come back and edit all the links in, because these are books many of you are going to want.

  • Local History

    foreground seedheads of hogweed and thistles, background Cathkin Braes a line of trees, looking out over Glasgow

    I have been finding out the history of this place. It has been occupied for a long time, and there was evidence of neolithic burials and cairns until the golf course was laid out and some rather nice late Victorian houses were built. Apparently that path I often photograph, with the beech trees and the wild apple, was once a Druid Grove, and the hill we walk up to where the rifle range is now used to have Beltane fires until the Reformation. There were Roman Camps here on Cathkin Braes, and there were coal mines in the fourteenth century. One French observer noted that labourers would be paid in ‘black stones’, which they set on fire, much to his amazement. It has been multi-cultural, and multilingual too, with speakers of Latin, Gaelic, Brittonic, Pictish and English all occupying the area at one time or another.

    It is all fascinating, but a lot of recent history is quite discouraging. This bit of country has been fought over, picked up, put down, taken in battle, or given away as dowries in complicated and repetitive squabbles since the Romans left. Farming has been a struggle, and mining, weaving, iron and steel making, quarrying and engineering have all been tried here, and abandoned. The few who made any money moved on, leaving the poor behind. Listening to today’s news, I know how it felt.

    But there is another story too. The author of the book I read speaks of a both the independent spirit of this town comapred with a lack of self-confidence in Scotland at large, and this is quite evident too. This is a resilient community, and a creative one. Schools and libraries have flourished here, poets and novelists, including one referenced by Burns lived close by at Gilbertfield Castle. The park is the first public park in Britain, and still has the slogan ‘At the Expense of All, for the Enjoyment of All’ proudly displayed at its gate. The park is well used, football, nursery schools, mothers doing yoga, fitness groups and joggers, dog walkers and old people sitting on the benches in the sun. There’s even a community orchard. The community is friendly, welcoming and generous and we are planning great things for Halloween, which we celebrate with enthusiasm.

    It is the most bountiful place too. In the spring I was amazed by the blossoming trees, and now there are so many berries everywhere. We went along the Clyde Walkway to pick brambles, but there were also hawthorns and rowan berries, rose hips and elder, and even some wild apple trees.

    a wild apple tree full of fruit

    We picked enough brambles for jelly and crumbles, leaving plenty for birds and other foragers. I’ve started here the way I mean to go on, and maybe forge some new local history.

    a table with some tubs of blackberries, a heap of small wild apples two bowls of seedheads

  • August Roundup

    herb bed at the Meadows Community Garden

    The Edinburgh Festivals are all happening again, and it has been lovely to be out and about. This photo is of the Community Gardens on the Meadows where I had the privilege of giving a creative writing workshop. The gardeners are lovely friendly people, and the work produced was very inspiring and exciting, but it was also wonderful to see the garden I’ve been hearing about so long. There are vegetable beds, fruit bushes, a compost heap, a bug hotel and some deep beds constructed and cared for by a local primary school, seating spaces and a table for shared meals. There are no fences so as to encourage anyone passing to access the space, and even a book swap box.

    a noticeboard backed with a glazed cupboard, books on the shelves behind the doors.

    I’ve been to some book festival events, hearing Ada Limon read from her amazing new collection – she was meant to be there in person, but couldn’t, as at the last minute she had to be sworn in as the new Senate Poet Laureate. I had also been to a discussion about it hosted by fellow Squirrel Sam Tongue, and it was a particular thrill to hear Ada Limon read some of the poems we discussed. And then yesterday I had an editorial meeting with a new poet I will be working with in the next few months.

    I can’t overstate what a delight and joy it was to be able to talk poetry in real life, and I’m very grateful to the people who gave me the opportunities. I’m not sure how they felt about it, though, as I was so excited I overflowed with talk like a shaken lemonade bottle. There needs to be much more of this in my life!

    Over the next week I will be at Moniack Mhor and when I came back I will be at the launch of The Earth Is Our Home, an anthology dealing with questions of the climate crisis, war, migration and other issues affecting human inhabitation of the earth. It is edited by Gerry Loose, and the launch will happen at the CCA on Sauchiehall Street Glasgow at 7pm.

    Otherwise, I’ve been reading Don Paterson’s The Poem, which is a big deep dive into the mechanism of poetry, but full of the kind of linguistics I tried to escape from as soon as possible, working on a revised and annotated translation of The Charm of Nine Herbs, and assembling some new poems, at last. The garden has been in survival mode lately, but next month there will be bulb planting deep mulching and some rethinking of the borders. I am hoping to start newsletters again, not so often, but more regularly, with advance notice of what’s coming up, and some content that is different from this blog, so please sign up via my contact page if you would like to receive it.

  • Where Poetry Started

    Poetry in the Garden starts
    when Colin strikes the small Tibetan bowl.
    The warmed and singing bronze awakes
    a humming clarity, which sounds
    through noise of knife and fork, book sales,
    poets checking one another out,
    and gathers stillness from the rainy night.
    Later, Gaelic, Arabic and Greek
    will take the song from tongue to tongue
    goltraighe, geantraighe, suantraighe.

    This is from Orpheus Plays (2) in my sequence Eurydice Rising which was first published by Sally Evans in Poetry Scotland in 2006. People who have known me since then will remember the Poetry in the Garden gatherings in Callander which were hosted by Sally and her husband Ian, and were such a highlight of our lives for such a long time. And yes, that is where poetry started for me, after a long time away from it.

    ‘Colin’ is Colin Will, who celebrated his 80th birthday on Friday, and yesterday launched Swept Together: New and Selected Poems, which I had the enormous pleasure of editing. And he did open proceedings by striking the small Tibetan bowl both in 2005, to call us to order and again yesterday. I first came across Colin when he hosted the Open Mouse section of Sally’s Poetry Scotland website (which he designed). He also designed the first websites for the Scottish Poetry Library and for StAnza, for which he was Chair (twice) for quite a while. It’s fair to say that Colin has been one of the foundation stones of the recent Scottish poetry scene.

    We met at Callander, then began to come across each other at poetry events. He founded Calderwood Press and published several people who also became friends – Anne Connolly, Marion McCready and Lindsay McGregor among others. Sally was his first publisher, but in 2010 The Floorshow at the Mad Yak Cafe was published by Red Squirrel Press, and now we share the editing for that press with Sheila Wakefield, about a third each. In 2015 we both had poems commissioned by StAnza based on a photograph with tree branches superimposed on a beach scene. Mine was weird and about dementia (you can find it in The Territory of Rain, it’s called Sea Henge), but his was typical of Colin, close observation of landscape, warm and affectionate, and with a touch of wry humour. We launched books together at StAnza in 2018, his The Night I Danced With Maya and mine Haggards.

    Editing Swept Together was a chance to remember all those poems, all those times when our paths crossed, and to remember when poetry started, and it was a chance to make sure that the ones I remembered so fondly didn’t get left out – Buzzard, The Last of the Little Green Men, Wonky, In Time – and many more. My debt to both Sally and Colin (and also to Sheila Wakefield, whom I met through them) is enormous.

    If you missed any of Colin’s previous books, this is a chance to catch up. You will find some humour, some very sensitive and thoughtful explorations of human relationships, a lot of forceful environmental anger, some gentle and witty observations on aging, love, death nationality and friendship.

    You can buy it here. You’ll like it. A LOT.

  • Limestone, Mudstone, Clay

    sedum, poppy, cranesbill in front, hyssop,dyers greenweed and hypericum behind

    The front garden is quite colourful this week, but it is telling me very forcefully that I have a lot to learn about this soil. Oh good, I thought, when I tested it in spring. It’s neutral and holds water well. No, it isn’t. It is alkaline becuse of the drift of coal measures just below the surface – pebbles of limestone and mudstone embedded in thick rubbery clay. It is neutral where the previous gardeners put lots of peaty compost, but where I dug up the scrubby lawn and corporate clumps of senecio the developers left, the soil is fine and stony, and where I have sifted out as many stones as I could bear to lift, the rain drains away as if through a colander. The camellia I brought from Stirling is not happy, but the lavenders love it. They like the fine soil and the sunshine, too. I hadn’t appreciated just how much more light and warmth this garden gets either – there’s a hosta in the back that looks positively bleached. Plants like the violets I thought would relish a sunnier place than they had in the old garden are telling me it’s all too much, and clamouring for a bit of dappled shade.

    Living here is like learning a new language. There’s a fizz and a sparkle about it, a generosity of flowers and insects that I didn’t know, but also a ruthlessness in the slugs that have eaten all my seedlings and the sawflies that have decimated the roses. I can grow things here I never expected to grow before, but I have to water and mulch more often. There are ladybirds and blue tits in abundance, but they aren’t dealing with the aphids as well as I expected – I think there isn’t yet enough cover for them to feel safe here, especially as there are a lot of cats in the estate. I’m going to have to plant more and save water, learn the new pests and deal with them, follow the patterns of cloud and sun – which I still can’t help feeling is in the wrong place, or coming from the wrong direction. It’s complicated too, by the dips and hollows, the angles at which the garden slopes away towards the south and west, and the insistence of plants I thought I would leave in the haggards. Look at this St John’s wort, crashing my planting of borage behind the juniper!

    borage seedlings and a lot of st johns' wort, prostrate juniper in the foreground.

    The poetry is struggling with this new territory, too, but there are lines coming through, and a whole new poem, which I’m going to be reading tonight at this lovely on-line event – Chill Out Session organised by fellow Red Squirrel and Stirling Makar, Laura Fyfe.

    https://www.facebook.com/events/1196564294410979?ref=newsfeed

    It would be lovely to see you there!

  • Unboxed

    sunset from Cathkin Brae
    Sunset from Cathkin Braes

    This was pretty much the last day that went to plan, Midsummer’s Eve. We went to watch the sunset, and it was rather lovely, in spite of the midges. And then we both got covid. Two trips and a birthday party had to be cancelled, we had several days of headaches, exhaustion and bad cold symptoms, and one trip to A&E, fortunately without lasting harm, though the the after effects linger – a poor sense of smell in my case, a wobbly voice in my husband’s. Bad timing all round, but we are past the worst.

    And finally, the bookshelves have been installed in the new library, and all the books are unboxed.

    library shelves full of books. A striped chair in front
    The nature library
    oak library shelves against a dark blue wall. Heavy steps in front
    the literature library

    It doubles as a chillout space for when family life is too noisy or hectic, and I hope it will be used for jigsaw puzzles and board games, editorial meetings and geopoetics discussions.But best of all, all the books are now where I can find them, and I can start on some of the reviews and research I have been planning.

  • Good Country Doctoring

    While I’ve been doing the research for the revised version of The Charm of Nine Herbs, I’ve been coming across some interesting anomalies. Sometimes it seems as if academics and enthusiasts are talking about medicine as if it was one practice, when it appears that in the past there were two entirely separate philosophies about health and healing. This comes up when we read about the ‘wise woman’ theory about the persecution of witches, or the role of the church in medicine, or the very muddled attitudes of scholars to the medical practices of the past.

    The first I’ve called ‘good country doctoring’. The phrase came up in a biography of the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, who lived in Kentucky from 1941 until his death in 1968. He had a complicated medical history, made more complicated by the prejudice of the monastery (which Merton mostly endorsed) against expensive specialist medical services, relying instead on the local practitioners. This is the traditional nursing care we all practice and take for granted – paracetamol for a headache or a high temperature, Vick rubbed on the chest for a cough, dock leaves on a nettle sting and so on. Before the rise of professional doctors, this was all most people had, and they would rely on the knowledge and expertise (which could be extensive) of family and neighbours to provide what was needed. Stitching up wounds, complicated surgery or delivering babies might have needed more, but was still often dealt with in the community. Knowledge was traditional and adapted to the locality and the lifestyle of patients, and probably every woman and most men knew enough to get by. Some would clearly have been better than others – more patient, more observant, more interested perhaps, and though some might have a local reputation for being good nurses or midwives, there were very little reliance on professionals at this level. A lot of the ‘wise woman’ traditional herbal knowledge is of this sort, and is now covered by the study of ethnobotany.

    The second part is really where the text books start. For the most part, sick people who were carefully nursed, then as now, either got well or died, but when there would be something new, or complicated or more critical than average, you had to deal with specialists. These might be either learned people ‘doctors’ or people with a particular gift, whom I am going to call ‘healers’ because I want to avoid getting into discussions about witches and shamans and things which are more precise than I want to be.

    Learned people had access to books and authorities like Galen, or medical schools like the one at Salerno. In the early Middle Ages these were mostly in monasteries, and monks would share their learning as part of their duties of hospitality to strangers and care for the poor. One consequence of this was that monks were constantly being distracted from the monastic life by the demands of wealthy patrons, and St Bernard of Clairvaux in particular was very clear that this should not happen. Stephen Pollington asserts in his book Leechcraft that he forbade them to engage in medicine at all, but this is not the case. As well as the detriment to the life of the monastery, Bernard was concerned that his monks should not have a more privileged life than the poor communities around them. Some of the remedies recommended by these authorities were exotic and expensive, and Bernard says that monks should restrict their treatments to ‘green herbs such as the poor have’.

    Dorothy Hartley in Food in England writes of a priest dealing with ‘diabolic posession’ by diagnosing ‘self neglect, starvation and feebleness’, and recommending good food, rest and a hot night-time drink. She says ‘ One does notice that the simpler the household, the simpler the medical usage. It is in later more complicated communities that we get the fantastically complicated remedies; and the more wealthy the patient, the more likely he is to die of his expensive treatment.‘ (p230).

    I have written in my essay By the Book (you can find a link to it on the non-fiction page) about later developments in knowledge of herbs and understanding of medicine, but this two tier treatment survived into the Victorian age. In Jane Eyre Jane is treated by an ‘apothecary’ while the Reeds consult a ‘surgeon’. And it still survives in the USA, where people who cannot afford the usual medical bills may turn to herbalists whose remedies are cheaper.

    But the ‘magical’ or spiritual element of healing hasn’t gone away either. In a fascinating book called Ireland’s Hidden Medicine by Rosarie Kingston, the Irish tradition of the person ‘with a cure’ is discussed. It’s quite a specific thing, a gift, and it isn’t usually rewarded with money. Other cultures have more developed traditions of rituals or magical powers. These cures aren’t something you can learn, and they often imply contact with ‘powers’ or supernatural agencies. Healers can appear within religious traditions and be accepted by them, or alongside them and be mistrusted. There may be an overlap between the herbal nursing knowledge and magical practice, depending on the culture, or the two processes might be quite separate, even antagonistic.

    My problem, disentangling the academic from the practical in my understanding of The Charm of Nine Herbs, is to decide what sort of healing we are looking at. Clearly, the eclectic mix of references to Woden and quotations from the Bible implies that the compiler of the document thought he was writing medical notes rather than theology. He was gathering up anything he thought might be useful, regardless of its source. But he has a much wider understanding of the healing process than we have and that is an interesting thought.

    I am also interested in applying the difference between the ‘learned’ and the ‘gifted’ to poetry, and seeing how this wider understanding of ‘healing’ can work there too.

  • Ceasing Never

    Keat’s poem The Grasshopper and the Cricket has the line ‘the poetry of earth is ceasing never’, and much as I have suffered badly with the post-book lull since The Well of the Moon came out, I’m beginning to feel more as if the poetry of earth hasn’t stopped here either. Preparing the poetry conversation about poetry and Geopoetics with Helen Boden has helped to get my mind back into gear, (you can find a recording of it here) and the fact that our new library is under construction so that I will soon be able
    to find all my books has given me a sharper focus on how I want my work to develop.

    I’m looking to make, and to write about poetry that centres the earth – the landscape where we live, and all the creatures who live there, not the occasional urban visitor. A poetry that is in conversation with the earth rather than commenting on it. And I’m looking to write some essays about both sides of that proposition – both ‘place writing’ and poetics – the philosophy and practice of earth-based poetry. The first of these has now been added to my non-fiction page. It’s a revised and extended version of a draft I sent out with my most recent newsletter and you can find it here.

    In the middle of that, my own personal ‘walking the territory’ practice, the herbs, the knowledge of how to grow and use them, the traditional practices and beliefs, the connections across cultures and history. I am working on a revised and annotated version of my translation of The Charm of Nine Herbs. The history of herbal medicine has a lot to teach writers about attitudes to language, landscape and indigenous knowledge, and it keeps my poetry grounded.

    strawberry pot, and new chamomile border

  • My Chemical Romance Tour

    There are a lot of people renewing their youth this weekend, as well as a lot of people who discovered The Black Parade for the first time only recently, because the long-awaited tour by the band My Chemical Romance is finally happening. My daughter is among them, but also, to my surprise, a lot of people I follow on social media for poetry purposes. I hope you all had fun – here’s a poem I wrote for you back in 2009!

    Orpheus Plays 2: Battlechant of the MCRmy


    He has never seen the venue from this side.
    Behind the amps, behind the rocksteady
    cordon in liveried t-shirts, he has not seen
    the broken vinyl, the congealed sweat
    that drips like greasy rain, advertisements
    for help-lines for the drugged, abused or disappeared.

    From his side, in the stagelight bubble’s
    liquid pulsing, he sees glitterflashes,
    a snowfall of shredded tickets, and the hands
    waving when he waves, love graffiti
    in tattoos and eyeliner, skull mittens,
    fingers making horns. He hears the screaming,
    singing in the pauses, maenad chanting
    MCRmy! What is your profession?

    He says he thinks of them as family.
    They tell him how his music saved their lives.
    He gives them songs of alienation,
    disillusionment, despair, death, pain and hell.
    They sing too. They already know those words.
    He tells them to be gentle to each other.
    He comes downstage, takes the mike and shouts
    I want to hear you mother-fuckers scream!

    It’s part of a sequence called Eurydice Rising and appeared in my first book, Wherever We Live Now (Red Squirrel Press) back in 2011. I still have a few copies—–

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