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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Walking the territory

Mixed Messages

We do have snow today, a mere icing sugar sift over the garden, already melting and inclined to slush. More is forecast tonight, and temperatures will drop to -5 (Centigrade – if you are in the US, this is a relatively balmy 25 degrees, but it’s increasingly rare here). But just now it is above freezing, and as I came in from the supermarket, there was a great tit singing as if spring had already been promised.

The Thaw
Just two degrees of difference.
The air softens and dulls, grass blurs.
The privet heights are quick with sparrow-bustle,
blackbird hop, wren flit, a new colony
born in craic and kerfuffle.

A great tit trapezes birch-stems
nibbling the catkin sheaths,
the see-saw strop of ‘teacher, teacher,’
sharpens the morning, adding fizz
to spring’s still coolness.

Ebb-tide is swimming with ducks,
upended, spinning, suddenly noisy.
Paired swans, humped leavings of snow,
melt into the drained river.
The slick banks slump into silty furrows.

Damp is gathering with the first drift of rain.
Earth relaxes ice-bound muscles,
lets out the sharp sour stink of thaw –
mud and leaf-mould, and frost-burned grass
collapsing into wetness, rot, fertility.

This poem comes from Wherever We Live Now, my first collection which came out in 2011. It is officially out of print, but I do have a few copies here. The same goes for The Territory of Rain, which seems to be getting a bit of attention, because it is the collection that is most landscape based of all my work. This poem featured in The Nature Library’s most recent newsletter.

A House for Winter

The sky opens blue windows
between shutters of grey cloud.
Winter peers in.

Brittle sunshine slants
between skeletonised trees,
thin relict leaves at twig tips.

A breath of frost melts
on the cold frame, split curls
of seedpods glued to the glass.

The dark glassy river is choked
with panes of broken ice,
curdled with falls of new snow.

The warm pigeon-feathered hollow
between railway bridge and river,
is a pot a-bubble with soft coos.

A white snow-mist climbs
the black walls of the hill.
Winter settles in.

I am getting mixed messages from the weather today, as in so much else!

January 7, 2021
Back on the Road

And a grey damp chilly road it is too this morning. Heavy rain is forecast, and frost by the end of the week, so we went for a walk while we could. There were crows and magpies in the oystercatcher field and deer browsing in the field below the Craigs, so winter has definitely arrived. A skein of geese flew along the Ochils, looking like nothing more than a fast-moving wisp of cloud until the leaders caught the sun, then lifted and disappeared over the brow of the hill.

Gardening is over for the season, apart from the cabbages and kale in the greenhouse, and the sparrows are back in the hedges, squabbling for places on the birdfeeders. The kitchen is full of jam, pickles and mincemeat and I have made the Christmas puddings, though we still don’t know who will be here to eat them with us. The rainbows we decorated our windows with at the start of the first lockdown have gone, and we are replacing them with Advent lights and decorations – this winter will need all the sparkle it can get!

Lockdown has hit everyone hard, and we are all sick and weary of it, but finally there does appear to be hope on the horizon for the spring, and meanwhile, I have been setting seeds for next year, working on my next collection – not nearly as close to finishing as I thought – thinking about plans for this blog, and for re-engaging with poetry in real life as soon as it is at all possible. I have read some great poetry, and some very inspiring nature writing, and discovered a lot of resources for the next phase – the Nature Library, Emergence Magazine, and the Inkcap newsletter. When I was first online there was a site called Habitat which provided a roundup of all the environmental news – needless to state it soon got overwhelmed by the avalanche of information available, and the demands of keeping up to date with the technology. Journalist Sophie Yeo who runs Inkcap seems to have a much more sustainable model, and provides an excellent service!

And on the poetry front, Colin Bancroft spent his lockdown putting together the amazing resource the Poets Directory. This includes the online magazine 192, and soon, the small press Nine Pens. I’m quite glad to report that, after all this activity supporting other poets, Colin has a pamphlet out himself, published by Maytree Press.

I’m also very pleased to tell you that I will have a a weird little sea poem in the next edition of 192 – another way in which I am back on the road!

November 23, 2020
The Opening of Autumn

This robin is very noisy these days, claiming the right to first dibs on anything I turn up as I clear the garden of all the spent flowers and dying foliage. There is a lot of tidying to be done, as I just threw a lot of annual seeds at one of the beds and stood back. I can’t recommend this – the erratic weather meant that things were late, slow or overcrowded, and I’m going to be much more thoughtful next year! But the robin is making the most of it, diving between my feet as I turn the soils over, almost tripping me up as I go to the compost heap, warning off the blackbirds snaffling the last of the rowan berries.

The garden is very birdy, so long as I stay still. Longtailed tits are working the cypress cones in the garden next door, and the coal tits and blue tits are dodging the chaffinches at the birds feeder. The sparrows are coming back to the garden, now that the fields have been ploughed and sown for next year, and the first wood pigeons have noticed the spilled grain, and are patrolling the lawn for maize seeds.

The geese are back in large numbers, and I’m trying to get photos of the long skeins as they unravel across the sky.

The arrival of these travellers reminds me that in a tree-dominated landscape like the village, autumn is not a time when the world begins shutting down – leaf-fall means it opens up, we can see out further towards the hills, the castle, the refineries at Grangemouth.

I was reminded, when I typed this of a poem in my River Calendar sequence, in The Territory of Rain, so here it is:

Wind Changing

A north-east wind rises, bringing with it
the rattle like promised rain of dry
birch leaves along the dusty pavement.
At night, ripe rain breaks like a wave
on the weathered shore of our slates.
Roof-beams creak and settle in their berths.
The crowded leaves of ash and beech disperse.
Light pours through rents in the orchard.
The world outside opens, comes closer.

October 16, 2020
Tappoch Broch

Brochs are tall stone towers, double walled, with viewing galleries. They are almost always situated in Scotland, mostly in the north and on the islands, and dating from the Iron Age. The most famous one is on Mousa. This one is the southernmost, and the closest to us, the Tappoch Broch at Torwood near Falkirk. It is pre-Roman, and excavations in 2014 showed the existence of an earlier hill-fort, and occupation in Neolithic times.

There isn’t much left of it now, just overgrown walls, a staircase

a bit of the gallery wall you can walk on to look out over the countryside, the doorway which I featured last week, and a fireplace, which I assumed had been improvised by campers, but which is actually an original structure

It retains its ancient atmosphere, but it is clearly well used by dog walkers and families, and well cared for. The path from the road sets the scene,

up through a forestry planting that has been partially harvested and cleared. Replanting has been carried out with mixed deciduous trees, oak and hazel and hawthorn, and wild trees, baby birch and seedling fir, are already making their presence felt.

Since lockdown, we have become more conscious of our need for contact with nature, of the impact wilder places can have on our well-being and self-understanding. One of the strands of my reading (which seemed fairly random and disorganised at the time, but which is settling into useful patterns of understanding now) has been the magical, shamanic, witchy kind of thinking that has crept into writing, not just from the romantic lawless outsider writers, but from some heavy-duty, politically engaged academics, which provides a very different perspective on what used to be dismissed as superstition and fantasy. I’m looking at books like Seán Hewitt’s Tongues of Fire, Rebecca Tamás’ Witch, Jacob Polly’s Jackself and Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sweeney Astray, and thinking some more about Kathleen Jamie’s famous ‘lone enraptured male’ article. I think we are looking at the emergence of a new take on nature writing, in which the environment is going to be the ground of all our moral, psychological and political thinking. You wouldn’t think a single walk on a sunny afternoon would do all that!

September 17, 2020
August in the Territory of Rain

It is harvest time now, and the air is hot and heavy. The forecast promises us three days of thunderstorms, but so far the air is still and grey. SEPA have issued a flood alert, but actual floods are relatively rare here, as we are on the higher bank of the river. This is the apothecary border, which is peak flowery just now. As well as this mass of marigolds and lavender, we have the hyssops, the blue peeping out from behind the purple sage

and pink, with just a hint of goldenrod beside it, coming into flower.

It is also peak berry bug time, and as I have very thin Celtic skin, I try to go out in the garden only when wearing full protective clothing, otherwise my life becomes a misery. I had to harvest my herbs and the gooseberries and redcurrants in the gardener’s equivalent of a hazmat suit – tights under my trousers, which were tucked into socks, my t-shirt tucked into my trousers, elasticated cuff on my jacket, and muffled up to the chin with a scarf. It was sweltering! But thyme and oregano, lavender, marigold and yarrow are safely gathered and dried, and redcurrant and gooseberry jelly are in the cupboard for winter.

All the birds have fledged by now, and the new generations have taken over the garden. Usually we have sparrows, dunnocks, blackbirds and starlings, but this year starlings have been fewer, and the space has been taken over by goldfinches which have been increasing in numbers over the last few years, bluetits, and for the first time, a group of long-tailed tits. Feeding the birds had to be stopped this year, as the riverbanks flooded in the winter, and rats moved into the village in large numbers, but this meant that pigeons were fewer, and it may have created safer spaces for the small birds. The swifts are gone, but the first clutches of swallows and housemartins are very busy over the fields and gardens.

Outside the village, the first barley fields are being harvested, and the wild raspberries are almost over. These are a yellow variety, which I’d never tried before, but which are delicious.

In the greenhouse, cuttings of herbs are putting down their first roots, peppers are fruiting, and I have picked the first tomato. It is an unusual variety, Paul Robeson, with very large fruit, with a Gothic tinge to it.

I’ll leave you with this poem about a garden tomato, first published in Gutter two years ago now.

From the Garden

A tomato should be warm,
the skin loose as on a granny’s hands,
fine as satin, but electric bright
with hoarded sun, a blaze.
The scent of that twiggy stalk
will cling to your hands all day

Your knife must be sharp.
When the edge is only a little blunt
the silky skin puckers and the cut
is ragged, the flesh bruised,
and all the sweet fluid lost.
You pierce the skin, and slice.

Red circles fall under your hands.
Seeds cling to the core, suspended
in a jelly carapace, a swim of juice.
Salt grains, fragments of crushed
black pepper, sweet balsamic sting
of dressing – summer on a plate.

August 10, 2020
Living La Vida Lockdown – Venturing Out

In Scotland we have just taken the biggest step forward out of lockdown, and things are tentatively opening up again. I’ve had a chai latte in a coffee shop, and we’ve had a proper visit from our daughter and grand-daughter. We are beginning to go a little further on walks – this photo was taken at Cambus Pools Nature Reserve. You can see that summer is moving on and there are fewer flowers, and more grass and foliage in my photos.

But one walk we took was nearer to home, and yet it is a place I’ve rarely been in the thirty-eight years I’ve lived here – Gowan Hill, near the castle – so near, in fact that Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army planted their guns there to attack it. It is a steep walk in places, which is probably why I haven’t been up there so often, but it was worth it to see plants I haven’t seen elsewhere in the area, like this chicory

and hear young sparrowhawks calling to be fed. I think I’ll be going up there much more often in future.

This is John Damian, the flying monk satirised in a poem by the fourteenth-century poet Dunbar. He attempted to fly from the castle battlements but was lucky to get away with a simple broken leg. This one, a leaping salmon, is carved into a tree stump.

I’m beginning to take lessons from the salmon, returning to their native streams, in spite of the currents and waterfallls that bar their path. Writing has been tough these last months. I’ve buried myself in other poets’ work, and sidestepped to do some background reading and look after my herbs and my family, and we have taken on the roller-coaster of a new diagnosis for one of us, with a complete rethink of how we move forward, plus the complicated shifts and tweaks for someone who is shielding. There have been days when simply making sure we got meals and the right medication was as much as we could do. But I am going to be as stubborn as the salmon. I’m preparing the next herb newsletter, and thinking of some book reviews and discussion pieces for the blog, because I’ve come across a lot of interesting resources for people who like writing about nature and place and community. It’s time to venture out again!

July 27, 2020
High Summer in the Territory of Rain

This post is likely to be a bit image heavy. Though I haven’t taken any photos outside my garden for what feels like months, there seems to have been a lot going on. The birds have all fledged in a rush, and the garden is full of baby starlings, gathering up the others of their generation like a graduation, chasing each other all over the garden, trying out anything they imagine might be edible, and creating a racket like a playground. They were preceded by the blue tits, who were first off the block, but very soon joined by goldfinches, robins, and this week, blackbirds. The swifts are back on the other side of the river, and swallows on our side now, so this week I hope to fulfil an ambition and take a video of them swooping around a particular bend in the river where they seem to congregate just before rain.

This is a particularly interesting bend of the river, because it is full of wild flowers – all the haggard herbs in my Charm poem grow here, and if you go at nightfall you can see bats, and especially because this year, we were in time to go out at sunset (10.30 here just now) to see the long-eared owls. They have nested here for a few years now, so we were tipped off that they had fledged and were about to disperse. We saw three, two young ones and an adult, flitting between the branches of the willows and ash trees, and calling to each other. You can hear it on the RSPB website here:

The garden is in full leaf now, and I have begun to harvest herbs – thyme sage and elderflower for drying, chives and mint in the freezer. The first berries are almost ready

and soon I’ll be taking the last picking of rhubarb. The tomatoes are showing the first flowers and the aubergines and peppers are growing every time I look at them.

Our village is quite pretty, and it is also very close to Stirling, so during lockdown, we have actually had more vistors than in the time when a neighbour over the river described it as being ‘like Sunday every day’ here. But it hasn’t been too difficult even though our footbridge is too narrow to pass anyone safely, and we have to ask people to wait if they see someone already on it. (Some don’t, but most do). But the effect of being more aware of the wildlife does seem to have affected us too. One night our neighbour’s security light was activated by a hedgehog crossing their lawn, and otters have been seen frequently in the river – though not by me. I haven’t seen the kingfishers either, though I am assured they are here.

The pond has had something of a disaster, as a mysterious plague hit the tadpoles, after we had topped it up with tap water. I don’t know if it was too chlorinated, or if it was very cold and was a shock, after all the hot weather, but there are very few tadpoles left this year. The water irises are thriving, though and we are hoping our water lily will flower, in spite of all the duckweed.

We are in phase 1 of easing the lockdown in Scotland. It seems very slow and measured, compared with the rate of progress in England, but there does seem to be a sense of ownership of the process, with most people continuing to bide by the rules. In phase 2 we will get to visit each others’ houses, which means it will be possible to visit our Glasgow family. We are all waiting to see whether our grandson will even remember us!

Wishing you all the joys of sunny weather, summer fruits and family meetings!

June 8, 2020
Light and Breezy

I think we need something more cheerful this week, and the weather has certainly delivered. It is bright, with a brisk wind from the north-east, that is surprisingly mild. Leaf and blossom are now well advanced, and more of the spring migrants have arrived, butterflies are emerging from hibernation, and although we didn’t have our usual spring frenzy of frog mating in the pond:

This is from 2015!

We do have some tadpoles, and possibly even some newt efts. I’ve been busy in the garden, and things are moving on. Annual seeds I sowed early last week are beginning to show through, and there are a lot of seedlings in the greenhouse.

I think there has been a stern puritanical spirit about, and many people seem to have taken to vegetable growing during the lockdown. I have to say that I have channelled my inner peasant, (never really too far from the surface) and I have more salad things growing this year than I’ve had since I gave up my allotment.

But the herbs aren’t being neglected

This is Solomon’s seal, growing in the shade of a birch and a holly seedling that sprouted from nowhwere some years back. Solomon’s Seal is known for the salve for bruises which can be made from the roots, which Culpeper notoriously described as being good for the injuries sustained in domestic violence. I’ll be working on a herb newsletter next week, featuring sorrel.

Somehow, I don’t seem to have written much (though revised a lot) but I have been working through my to-read list, with some mixed results. I can, however, wholeheartedly recommend Kei Miller’s In the Nearby Bushes, Moya Cannon’s Donegal Tarantella, and The Craft, a book of essays on making poetry edited by Rishi Dastidar. It’s brilliant for when you know a poem isn’t working and you’re wondering what on earth you missed.

James McGonigal’s In Good Time should have had its virtual launch by now, but we are waiting for the cover image. Everything is a bit slower just now, but let me tell you, it will be a book worth waiting for!

April 23, 2020
Bounded in a Nutshell

The territory has shrunk to my back garden, but I thought we could do with a few peaceful and pretty photos this week. Although it has been cold, there has been a long dry period, and spring is beginning to move at last. There are birds nesting in the hedges, and yesterday I heard all the sparrows yelling at each other for the first time in the usual nesting colonysetting boundaries way. Their tenement is in the back hedge this time – cold winds have left the side hedges bare of leaves and a bit too exposed to the attentions of a pair of magpies and a big crow that comes every morning to check out the pond. I suspect he is the reason why we have no frogspawn this year. As well as the usual coal tits, blue tits and great tits, I’ve seen wrens, robins, dunnocks, blackbirds and thrushes, and most exciting of all, a pair of bullfinches, which are a rare sighting here. There was a wren scoping out a pot of ivy on our side wall, and for a wild minute I hoped they might nest in it, because it is just below my study window, where I would be able to see into it. On reflection, though, it may be too near the back door.

There’s a lot to keep me busy just now. I have been clearing the debris from the winter and seeing what has survived, repotting plants on the patio, and starting seeds. Somewhere along the line I seem to have ordered more vegetable seed than ususal and now I have lettuce, radish and spinach in big pots and a lot of seedling peppers, aubergines and tomatoes in the greenhouse.

Geese are heading northward this week, and there were bumble bees in the garden when I was out, at last. I had begun to be afraid they had all drowned when the soil got so wet. I missed the curlews arriving, and I have yet to hear skylarks from the fields, but with the sunny weather, I’m sure it won’t be long.

I’ll be doing a couple more virtual launches over the next few weeks, and a newsletter, perhaps by the weekend. It got held up, not only because life got so weird lately, but because it will feature dandelions, and the flowers seem very late this year. In the meantime, I wish you all good health, peace of mind, and pleasant company.

April 1, 2020
A Lick of Colour

A couple of weeks back, I posted an essay called The Occasional Tang of Salt, in which I described how our house was built as three holiday lets for the Glasgow Boys, who came here, partly to learn from Joseph Denovan who set up a school about a mile away called Craig Mill – where the ‘Edwardian Country Lady’ Edith Holden spent some time – but partly to paint in rural surroundings. James Guthrie painted Women Working in a Field here, and William J Kennedy painted Harvest Moon – we still dispute about whose houses are in it! Some had more permanent studios, but I don’t think any artist could have been comfortable in the two room flats, with shared wash-house facilities outside for more than a summer holiday.

All the same it is clear that some trouble was taken to make the rooms fit for paying guests. The house was knocked about a bit in the last century – combined into one in the 1950’s and extended in the nineties (by us). Remedial work has been done on damp-proofing, and the water-pipes had to be dug up and buried to the standard depth because they kept freezing up. So although I knew there had been a bit of fancy paintwork under the woodchip wallpaper in one of the rooms, I wasn’t prepared to find this survival:

I have to admit, the photograph makes it look a bit more classy than it does in real life. The colours are more faded, and the whole wall has been knocked about a lot since it was done (in 1901 or thereabouts – the house was built about 1891, so this would have been a make-over). I got this date when I put the picture on Facebook, and two other people told me they had found similar paintwork in their houses, from about that date.

So this isn’t a spontaneous burst of artistic activity, like the house at Charleston where Vanessa Bell and her friends seemed to have painted every surface they could reach, but a slightly upmarket interior design cliche. I’ve been looking on-line to see what the bobbles might be – they certainly aren’t Mackintosh roses, though they look like them. I hoped they might be apples, which would have had a certain local reference, as Cambuskenneth was known for its orchards, but at a guess, I’d have to say they are pomegranates, done from a simplified stencil for mass reproduction.

We can’t restore the whole design, tempting as it might be. It would be a heck of a job, even if we could get the right paint. So we sre going to cover it up carefully, so that the next owner of the house will have the option – or failing that, a genuine glimpse of the history of the house.

December 10, 2019

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