Dark Night
April 17, 2026Reading time: 6 minutes
I have been checking the proofs of the book, which is now with the printers, and though I am busily arranging readings, and updating all my online profiles, I am also getting reacquainted with something that I almost feel I wrote in another century. One thing that surprised me, though goodness knows it shouldn't, with a title like that, is the number of poems inspired by things that happened on nights when I couldn't sleep.
Sometimes it was ordinary observations of foxes, owls calling or people chatting as they passed in the dark. There is a footpath that runs beside our house across a grassy open field, and you often hear the young ones on their way home from parties or all-night video game sessions, the stragglers from late-running barbeques or even other insomniacs walking their dogs. More than once there were ambitious, if rather inept, burglars trying our front door. Once there were three young foxes playing on the grass, a vixen calling in the tangle of brambles above the burn. I thought about the differences between the way we see wild creatures and the way we see young people, the way we see neighbours and the way we see strangers. I remembered stories about fairy people with all the ambivalence of wonder and magic and mischief, and that in some communities, if you wanted to speak about them you called them 'the good neighbours'. It's not just who we see, and how we see them, it's who sees us.
I connected with my forgotten younger self lying awake listening to people in the street going home from the pub, or hearing heavy footsteps echoing in the entry passage between the houses.
After Bedtime
Before I could read, I slept no more than a cricket
does in summer, chirping and jumping out of bed,
inventing fears when giant footsteps sounded
in the entry between the houses - my father
coming home from night school, a neighbour
off the late shift. Bigger children playing out,
men singing in the dark, made nights mysterious,
the grownup world, longed-for and forbidden.
Now the clump of feet as neighbours douse
their barbeques and walk their dogs, young ones
slink home after curfew, girls post-mortem shifts
in friends’ relationships, lads fail to ask whose jacket
they’re wearing now, is comforting, familiar.
I have learned the landmarks. I know where I am.
I have never slept very well, even as a baby, and I was always in trouble for reading until it was dark, or jumping out to see if we had visitors, or getting up very early to write in peace, before anyone else could ask what I was doing. Later, as life got darker and more anxious, I would lie awake for hours worrying about the children, or the health of whichever one of us was in hospital, our financial stability or global warming and the end of civilisation, or if I was going out of my mind.
Which brings me to the other 'dark night' in the book. I got to the phrase from the translation of the Homeric poem in praise of Hermes, the original 'comrade of dark night', which led me to alchemy, and the alchemical process of personal growth, and so back to St John of the Cross, whose commentary on his great poem, The Dark Night of the Soul, shows parallels with the thinking of alchemists of his day. It's a cliché now for a period of misery and self-questioning, but I thought it might reflect the time we had all gone through during the pandemic. Many of us suffered losses, bereavements, upheavals, long periods of anxiety and isolation. Some people had it easier than others, but very few of us got out unscarred in some way. There are a lot of poems in this book inspired by our housemove and settling into a new environment. It wasn't just strangeness and adaptation, it became a process of recovery - finding or making connections, accepting losses and changes, finding ways of healing and connecting, finding new joy.
Come and listen! My first reading will be at St Bride's Church Hall, 21 Greenlees Road Cambuslang G72 8JB, at 2.30 on 7th May. There will be music as well as poetry from me and Anne Connolly, tea and cake!
The second one will be at St Mungo's Mirrorball, in Waterstones on Sauchiehall Street, on 14th May from 7-9. I don't yet know who the headliner will be, but there will be several other poets reading too. This is free to Mirrorball members but £7 for non-members. Membership is £25 pa, so you only have to go to four events to be in profit, and for that you will hear some of the best poetry available in Scotland.
The book will be available from the publisher Red Squirrel Press, and from my shop, after the 7th May.
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