The Territory of Rain
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The Territory of Rain, set in the village in the Forth Valley where I have lived for thirty-three years, is my second collection, and deals with the different ways humans make their homes in a particular landscape – their observations and interactions with it, the structures they build or abandon there, the myths they create about it, and the way they shape and are shaped by it through what happens to them.
Reviews
Here are poems that reflect an acute observation of the natural world; poems written with an authority derived from being immersed in the subject— Rimmer places human activity within great expanse of ‘earth-time’
Stuart B Campbell
Her collection is hopeful, infused with the promise of spring and a comfortingly maternal approach to landscape; although her poems delve into more serious topics, such as her friend’s ‘farewell to arms’ and the sadness of a declining life, it remains a quiet celebration of life,
Rachel Walker SWC blog
This is a collection of finely observed gifts from the natural world crafted with care and an enviable flair for language. On every page Elizabeth Rimmer magnifies with colour and movement the landscape and small animal life which surrounds us. She approaches nature with a quiet spiritual awareness in contrast to her energetic use of language. This is not nature as passive observation; the landscape itself speaks and at times becomes a vehicle for myth and fairytale. These poems communicate beautifully with rich visual detail fused with a light lyrical touch.
Review by Keith Parker of Poetry Talk
Explaining a Few Things to Neruda
You will ask why my poetry
speaks of leaves and green rivers
and that family of goosanders
spinning and diving and drifting downstream
on the ebb tide this rainy morning.
Where are the unemployed? you ask,
the litter, the broken windows,
graffiti curse-words and allegations,
the lost generation, the hope of revolution?
You will ask why my poetry is so pretty,
all those woodlands and winter skies,
when jobs are scarce and art is strangled
and freedom is bought and sold with oil.
In those fields we have no lapwings,
no hares, a stillness of yellow rape,
and wheat after barley after wheat.
The skylark song is quenched in rain.
The moon rises over green absence.
Once there were bitterns in those reeds –
salmon, kingfisher, tufted duck,
children at the village school – all gone.
We wash the guilt of extinction off our hands.
Oh, see, the blood of extinction on our hands!
Photos from the launch at Callander Poetry Weekend, September 2015
