BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

haggards

World Wetlands Day

Today is World Wetlands Day. I have form with wetlands, since my poem about blanket bogs was used in an installation by the Royal Botanical Gardens of Edinburgh, and even featured on the side of a bus to advertise it. This is a later poem, however, from The Well of the Moon, which deals with the Avalon Marshes in real life, but also the landscapes of our hearts and heritage, and the myths we create to try to express them.

Lost Roads
I am haunted by wet places, the lure
of rivers, reedbeds and green lands of ash
and willow. The drift of water, pooling
between the autumn stems and wind-frayed flags
of common sedge and reed, is like the course
of blood, of thought, deep in the mulch of me.
There is talk of lost roads, boardwalks
of planks and narrow handrails
hid deep beneath the quaking ground
with its stealth of buntings, stepping heron,
its shattered tops of bulrush, spilling
cottony seed for birds like new coins
at a wedding scramble. The hidden past,
with its myths of Romans and lost queens
of the Iron Age, threads its careful way
through thickets of imagined story, and I,
not immune to this casual appropriation,
imprint my own lost ancestors, finding
or inventing the feel of home here, roots
where there may be none, whole trees
growing into the open wind and sky.

I’ve been thinking about the celebrations that have happened this week, whether you call it the Feast of St Bride, Brigid’s Day or Imbolc. I am delighted that in Ireland it is being kept as a public holiday – goodness knows we could do with one at this time of year, and I’m not sure that Robert Burns Day quite has the impact. These spring celebrations are all about returning to the light, or bringing into the light things that have been nurtured in the dark, and so I thought I might write a little about my four poetry books, that don’t seem to have seen the light of day much lately.

Wherever We Live Now came out in 2011, published by Red Squirrel Press. It has a lot of seasonal poems in it, a few about exploring my Irish heritage, and a sequence about the Orpheus myth, which was the closest I ever came to an artists’ practice statement. It has a cover image by the film-maker Alastair Cook, a Berneray landscape showing the land merging with sea and sky.

The Territory of Rain came out during a very scary time in 2015 when my husband was hospitalised with myasthenia gravis, which probably explains the rather high proprtion of death poems in it. The hospital was wonderful and they discharged him just in time to come to the launch. This is the most explicitly geopoetical of my books, and has a very special cover image by Gerry Cambridge on the front. How special it was I didn’t realise until 2019, when his book The Light Acknowledgers (Happenstance Press) and I found it was a picture he had written a poem about.

Haggards came out in 2018. It was centred around herbs and dealt with social and environmental collapse and regeneration. I think it is the most popular of my books, having been reprinted twice. Gerry Cambridge excelled himself with the design, providing not only the beautiful cover image, but a tiny wren hopping about on the title page of the sequence The Wren in the Ash Tree.

The Well of the Moon came out during the pandemic. It has a lot of plant and herb and landscape poems as you might expect, but was inspired by mental health issues (my own and other people’s) which lead me to reflect on what ‘a person’ is, and what the sense of identity is made of. Gerry’s cover image this time features a crescent moon and a feverfew plant, which appears in the first poem in the book.

The two most recent books are still available from the publisher, but the first two are out of print. I still have the last remaining copies, however, if anyone would like them. You can buy them from my shop, and I don’t charge for p+p in the UK. You don’t need Paypal either as I’ve enabled credit card payments.

All of that was three years ago, and it’s probably time I was thinking of a new one. The news is, I am indeed. So far it is called The Midsummer Foxes, and is about land and belonging, magic and death, the self and the other – and music. It won’t happen for a couple of years yet, but yes, it is coming into the light!

February 2, 2024
The Season of the Witch

This is the title of a song by Donovan – you can hear it here. But it’s also an appropriate title for what’s happened here in the Haggard. Lockdown has given me more chance to read, and though its fair to say a lot of it has been thoughtless escapist reading, there has been a lot of reading that was truly excellent, thought-provoking, joyful or inspiring. For poetry there was Seán Hewitt, Rebecca Sharp, Natalie Diaz and David Morley, but there has also been prose from Alice Tarbuck, Rebecca Tamás, Elizabeth Jane Burnett and William Least-Heat Moon.

While I’ve been thinking about the burned thumb legends, Finn and the salmon, Sigurd and the dragon’s heart and the cauldron of Ceridwen for the next collection, it occurred to me how much of today’s writing concerns by crossing the barriers between us and the other creatures we share the world with. There is a lot of shamanic writing about, and a lot of witches.
There was a time when witches on the internet were gentle wise earth-mother people, much into self-care and spirituality, the sort I had in mind in my poem in Haggards:

She haunts you, that possible self,
a wise earth mother, whose pots
run over with good food, medicine,
dyes for hand spun wool, or soap.
There’s comfort in that channelled woman
who knows her place, seductive
as Circe, but nurturing, her power
contained in that small scented realm.
There’s glamour there, the lure
of home, an art-nouveau dream
of flowing skirts, long hair,
a voice of power, though gentle,
glimpsed firesides, the feel of magic
in the dim cave of your house,
archetypal,
Dreaming of Herb Gardens

You can still find many of them at the Earth Pathways Diary, (where, however, they are very much less quietist than you might think). They were peaceful, misunderstood but anti-intellectual and a little bit anarchic, no threat to anyone really, and wasn’t it a shame that so many were burned?

These witches are not at all like that. A lot of the witch-writing is not only heavy-duty intellectual, but academic, and it is no longer a gentle faerie aesthetic side-line to mainstream culture, but is seriously engaged in creativity, environmental activism, feminism and politics.

Alice Tarbuck

Alice Tarbuck’s A Spell in the Wild looks at first sight to be a book of the familiar sort, with its recipes, its lyrical nature writing and its reminiscences. It is a most endearing and engaging read, but it deftly tucks a lot of something much more subversive and interesting under its ‘broad-brimmed fetching black hat’. Tarbuck is very clear about the fallacy of romantic connections with beautiful or wild spaces as a prerequisite for magical connection. Witchcraft for Tarbuck is not an aesthetic nor an escape from uncomfortable reality. She writes graphically about the squalor of the urban settings most people have access to, finding as much connection to the weeds growing in cracks in tarmac and gulls scavenging among the litter as among woods and fields and mountains.

We’d like to do our magic in beautiful places: in green fields by clear rivers, in lovely cottages, all stone and roses round the door. But the world is full of municipal buses, and drying greens, and scrubby grass that’s been kicked up by football boots. It’s full of squirrels eating spring bulbs and broken bottles on pavements and uncollected Christmas trees, and dog shit. It’s full of crumbling flats and expensive heating, and friends we love getting fucked over for jobs, or getting ill. It is full of precarity, and worry, fascist governments continents catching fire and the long shadow of global pandemic. P 9.
We bring things into relation with ourselves, to help us practise effectively, but those things can be, well, almost anything. Empty pizza boxes, our child’s crayons, whatever we have to hand —We make magic as best we can, with what we have, acknowledging that everything in the world, from the most beautiful thing to the least, exists in relationship to us. P11
A Spell in the Wild, p 9-11

Her understanding of witchcraft is explicitly inclusive, avoiding some of the pitfalls that plague a lot of pagan groups – nativism, heteronormative assumptions or preoccupation with giftedness. It is grounded very firmly in her urban experience of precarious employment, deprivation, marginalised communities and environmental destruction. It questions the oppressive structures of society and creates agency in a world where we are increasingly directed to become cogs in the machine.

Rebecca Sharp

Rebecca Sharp published a pamphlet called The Beginners recently in which she and sound artist Simon Whetham create images and sounds relating to human occupation and abandonment of landscapes. Opening with the phrase, ‘This is becoming a ritual’, the images and texts establish a process of connecting and learning, leaving and re-learning what it means to live in places that may be new to us, but have an old life of their own.

In an earlier work, Peripheral Visions: Edge Hill Arcana, she uses tarot to unlock creative responses to various locations around the university. As she explains in the accompanying essay it is ‘a creative response that aims to restore ‘individual perception, practice and agency’ while nourishing meaningful experiences of connection: demonstrating the ability of those divinatory objects and systems in the construction of meaning story and place.’ (p54) Divination, she points out, is less prophecy and more imaginative reconstruction of perceived norms – a desire to reclaim individual identity and agency in the world’ (p56).

Rebecca Tamás

Rebecca Tamás goes one giant step further. In The Songs of Hecate: Poetry and the Language of the Occult, an article in The White Review (issue 24 march 2019) she writes:

My particular occult interest is the witch – the witch as an explosively radical female figure, a site of resistance, a way out of silence and silencing. What she has made possible for me is a new relationship with poetic speaking, with the power of the word, and with what that power might make possible for liberatory, feminist thinking.The Songs of Hecate
The Songs of Hecate

In her collection Witch, she does just this, in explosively original poetry. Here the witch comments on the suffragettes:

Again somehow the witch finds it is about eating and not eating
they don’t eat and so they are made to eat
she asks a policeman ‘what is it with this eating thing?’
but he doesn’t know why just that when a woman eats
she is eating for the state
when she watches her friend forced to lie back and be fed
she retches
the feeding is the same as being sick it is the same as not
being fed because it leaves you hungry
ghost meal fattened with air.
WITCH AND THE SUFFRAGETTES

Tamás gleefully embraces all the misogynistic stereotypes thrown at women – witch, hooligan, nag, sex demon – and uses them in a blazing critique of the whole patriarchal hegemony from capitalism to religious orthodoxies, government to academia, right down to the philosophical gate-keeping of assumptions about ‘rationality’. I have been impressed with this book since I read it, but when I went through looking for quotes, I realised I’d forgotten how adventurous it really is. It is hard to find quotes suitable for this blog, though – when the cover describes it as a ‘small bright filthy song’, that isn’t an understatement.
As a Catholic, I have enough rituals and symbols in my life already, and there are a lot of places where I would disagree strenuously with many of the arguments made in these books. But I can’t deny we need such a radical rethink of current orthodoxies, and there is plenty of find common ground. My attention was drawn, when I was writing the ‘valiant women’ section of The Wren in the Ash Tree for Haggards, to the way women activists often act out of an awareness of the connections between campaigning for their own rights to tackling poverty and environmental exploitation.

Women whose signals were sent
through poetry and politics, songs
and planted forests, women whose voices
cry out for the poor, for democracy,
for the life of women, for the earth.
The Wren in the Ash Tree: There are Lights

In Strangers, Tamás makes this connection more explicit, writing about ‘watermelon people’, green outside, socialist within. I’ll finish with her vision of a world that is really willing to tackle the problems we face.

‘such a radically different world may not be as comfortable as what we in the west currently experience. It might, however, be a world with many more forms of thinking available to us – of joy, of freedom, of pleasure, of community, of self-worth and of love’
Strangers, p23

November 27, 2020
Living La Vida Lockdown – the Books

Not as many as you’d think, but some of the books I’ve been reading have been fabulous. One trend I’ve noticed however – the number of men who are writing about herbs! I’m sure when Haggards came out it was mostly women who liked the herb poems, but lately things seem to be a bit different. I’ll get to Seán Hewitt later, and in another context, but for now, lets look at Kei Miller’s In Nearby Bushes.

‘Nearby bushes’ in Jamaica are not merely undergrowth or shrubbery. They are the equivalent of ‘the forest’ of medieval outlaws, ‘the bush’ in Australia, the back streets of urban estates, the closes of older Edinburgh, the ‘no go’ areas of countries in a state of civil unrest. It was tempting to draw a parallel with my ‘haggards’, especially as Kei Miller discusses issues around forced exile, colonialism, and suppression of indigenous knowledge (including herbal medicine), but as we will see, ‘nearby bushes’ are a darker place. Whereas my haggards and maquis are places of neglect, exile and abandonment, but also sources of resistance and revitalisation, ‘nearby bushes’ are an insight into the ‘shadow’ (in a Jungian sense), of Jamaican culture.
It is the essence of the shadow that it should not be known and understood in itself, but should be spoken of only in line with the expectations of the dominant mindset, and in the second section Sometimes I Consider the Names of Places, Kei Miller draws attention to this – all the colours have been subsumed under ‘green’ in To Know Green from Green, all the islands are ‘Indio’ in Sometimes I Consider the Names of Places (3):

We are insufficiently imagined people from an insufficiently
imagined place

and the magnificent Place Name: Oracabesa, which points out that the whole country is being assessed solely in terms of the gold which colonialists expected to find there. What we know of a place or a people is limited by the limitations we create in our language.

In Scotland, where the history of erasure and exile in the Highlands was suppressed until recently, while at the same time, Scottish people enacted the very same oppression elsewhere in the name of the British Empire, it relevant that Miller also discusses how Jamaicans themselves align themselves with the dominant colonial culture, denying their history, forgetting their own local knowledge and stories, abandoning local dialects to speak with ‘sweet yankee accents’ or aspiring to own a BMW X5 (VII:II). It is important for Jamaicans to be aware of the stubborn survival of native folk tales and urban myths amid

de heap
of bruk bokkle & de plenty bun up cyar

and the mint, pawpaw sage and ginger, the poisonous or healing plants that grandmothers know.

they are here – in the complications of roots, in the dirtiness
of dirt.

And not only survival, but development. Here Where Run the Wild Deer deals with the importation and escape into the wild of six reindeer, which behave like the invasive species we deplore here, but in this poem serve as a parable of adaptation and inclusion ‘how to belong/where we do not belong’.

But he also points out that the shadow is a place of denial and scapegoating, where a people may indiscriminately locate things they don’t want to accept, like poverty, shame, homosexuality, crime, violence. It is a place of judgement, where to be found is to be made a criminal or a corpse and all sense of individual identity is lost. The book opens with a memorial list of ‘only some’ of those found dead there and the last section, In Nearby Bushes, is a meditation on the death of a young woman, who becomes again a real individual person – ‘in the dream you are my cousin’, whose death is mourned, and whose life is given the value and dignity the nearby bushes have denied her.

This is a dark book, with dark themes, but it is not heavy. There is a lightness, a conversational tone ‘I mean the flowers —- I no longer mean the flowers’ (Here Where Blossoms the Night) which belies the complexity of the subject and a great attention to the skills of story-tellers. The rhythms are crafted for careful reading aloud, with beautiful cadences which remind me of the King James translation (or in my case the Douai) of the Bible, though there are no explicit verbal echoes. Although 2020 has been a fabulous year for new poetry (Moya Campbell, Alice Oswald, Natalie Diaz and Seán Hewitt, so far, and it’s only August), I think this might be the outstanding book of the year, for me.

In Nearby Bushes

Kei Miller

Carcanet 978 1 78410 845 8

August 17, 2020
50 Years Ago

Robert MacFarlane was talking on Twitter this week about herbals, and asked if anyone had one or used one, so I said I had made one and then I thought it might be interesting to show you mine.

my herbal

I suppose it is fifty years ago, give or take, since I created my first herbal. You can see that There have been a few changes over that period – the smaller, faded and discoloured pages are the first ones – we didn’t have A5 paper in those days, and my handwriting has developed some since then. It isn’t in the original binder, either – that succumbed to hard wear several years ago, and I now have a very robust one from Staples.

My drawing skills haven’t though! That little yellow picture of peppermint was cut from an original paper bag of Ricola cough candy – which I still buy – and the little picture of salad burnet on the bottom page was laboriously traced and coloured, but bears very little resemblace to the real thing. These days I rely on photos, which are quicker and give me much better results.

I’m still adding to it, as I learn more about the place plants have in our lives. I have used it to cook from, make medicinal teas, skin balms, pot pourris and more recently, to dye from.

I used it for the Half a Hundred Herbs posts, the Haggards poems, and for the background for my translation of the Charm of Nine Herbs, and I’m using it now as material for the ‘inspired by herbs’ newsletters. That’s not bad, for fifty years!

July 4, 2019
Third Imprint of Haggards

A very short post today, just to say that I have new copies of Haggards, in its third imprint, if anyone would like a signed copy. I don’t charge for posting and packaging within the UK, but please email to ask about the cost of sending it further afield.

You can also get it from the Red Squirrel Press website, now updated and humming along beautifully in its proper domain. Red Squirrel Press doesn’t charge for p&p in the UK either, and you might see some of the other lovely books for sale there too.

June 20, 2019
Latest News and Some Upcoming Events

This is a ragbag of a post, but if you don’t do Facebook you will have missed some interesting bits of recent news.

Firs ts that the second imprint of Haggards has sold out ( I still have a few though—-). The third imprint has been ordered and will be available from Red Squirrel Press as soon as possible, and I will have more copies to sell in the shop too. Neither Red Squirrel Press nor I charge for postage and packing within the UK (please add £2 if you live abroad). And I will sign any that you order from me.

becoming botanicals

This is a glimpse of the new anthology Becoming Botanicals, in which I have a poem. You can find more information on the post, which also includes a link to the fundraiser, and a glimpse of the perks on offer. The proofs are coming out very shortly, and publication will be in June. But don’t you think it looks lovely?

Then another anthology I was involved in, Umbrellas of Edinburgh, which was edited by Claire Askew and Russell Jones and published by the ill-fated Freight, is now going to be reissued by the imaginative and innovative Stirling Publishing (nothing to do with where I live, the reference is to the Commissioning Editor, Tabatha Stirling). It’s going to have a new cover, illustrated maps, a new foreword and some new poems, and should be out by Christmas. And as part of the project, some of the poets (Harry Giles, me, Gerda Stevenson and Alice Tarbuck) will be filming a reading of their poems in situ. My poem, Grassroots in Edinburgh, is going to be filmed in the Meadows, and it’s all very exciting.

A third anthology I’m involved in, Scotia Extremis, is going to have an Edinburgh launch in Blackwells on South Bridge in Edinburgh, on the 3rd of May at 6.30pm.

Now, switching to my editor hat, three poetry collections I’ve edited are going to have launches in the next week. On Saturday 6th April at 1pm in the Scottish Poetry Library, Red Squirrel Press will be launching books by John Bolland (Fallen Stock) and Mandy Haggith (Why the Sky is Far Away). And on Tuesday 9th April, in the Scottish Writers Centre, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, John Bolland, Jon Plunkett (whose debut, A Melody of Sorts I edited), Anne Connolly (Once Upon a Quark) and Thomas Stewart (Empire of Dirt), will be reading from their new publications. It has been an enormous pleasure to be involved with these books, and the events should be a delight.

April 4, 2019
Go Little Book

What a weekend! It was a cold day, but lots of wonderful people came to The Scottish Poetry Library for the launch of Haggards. My brother came from Preston, all my family left their usual Saturday things, friends from Perth and Cupar Angus, poets and geopoeticians.

Sheila Wakefield said some very kind things, and I read a lot of poems. I love to do this, and it made my day when people said they liked it – reading aloud where other people can hear me is a hard-won skill.

We ate almost all the cookies, and people bought books, and we all went to the Serenity Cafe next door for tea and cake.

Now the book is out there in the world, and you can buy it from the Red Squirrel Press website, or from the new shop on here – postage is free to the UK. It costs £10.

Thank you to Sheila Wakefield, my publisher, to Gerry Cambridge who designed the cover, which everyone loves so much, to everyone who came, to those who bought books, to those who shared the event on social media – I’m overwhelmed by the kindness people have shown me – and those who have posted supportive comments since.

February 14, 2018
New Year, New Book

As it’s only just over a month until the launch of Haggards, I guess it’s time I started talking about it a bit! I don’t have a cover image yet but I hope these roses will give you a taste of what’s to come. They are growing in a stretch of wild land near my house. They are one of nine herbs I picked to write about in a poem called A Charm of Nine Haggard Herbs.

A ‘haggard’ is a patch of rough ground, too small to be cultivated. It often refers to where Irish labourers were allowed to grow food for themselves, but it survives in Ireland for patches of wasteland or hedgerow. Seamus Heaney uses it in Servant Boy –

your trail

broken from haggard to stable,
a straggle of fodder
stiffened on snow,
comes first-footing

the back doors of the little
barons:

but I confess I found the word in a cookery book. It’s exactly the concept I wanted for the book. I started by thinking of borderlands – here’s what I wrote in a piece called Maquis Machair Mearc:

The eleventh design principle of permaculture is to ‘use edges and value diversity’ – you can find the rest here if you’d like to follow them up. The reason is that where two sectors overlap, the border region shares characteristics of both, and can support more (species, ideas, artforms, activities) than either sector by itself. Permaculture design in landscape tends to create a lot of margins, most notably in the iconic herb spiral, specifically to maximise the different crops which can be grown in a small space.

Herbs are a great example of being on the edge. Herbs touch borders on a practical level with cooking, fabric crafts, housekeeping, medicine, magic, animal husbandry, but also culturally with values of simplicity, authentic living, connection with nature, feminism, healing, spirituality, value for the senses and the body, recovery of one’s personal identity, resistance, repentance, wildness, renewal. There’s a lot of potential in herbs, for all sorts of reasons. I’m going for a dander along the edges of the garden, the roadside, the riverbank – and the uncanonical margins of the poetry world.

Now here I have to admit that I have been somewhat seduced by language. The headline of this post is a coincidental resemblance I’ve had in my head for some years, and it may be spurious. I was thinking of borderland country, marginal, a bit precarious, but which is characterised by a wealth of flowering plants, and surprising survivals – black bees on the machair of Coll, or the French resistance, that sort of thing. But the maquis isn’t the fragrant hillside, full of bees and lavender and sage and hyssop. That’s the garrigue. And the mearc is a more political thing – the badlands where law doesn’t run, and monsters may lurk among the outlaws. The English-speaking equivalent of the machair is the hedgerow, with its associations with foraged herbs, sloes and blackberries, and also the hedge witch, the hedge school, the tramps and vagabonds. But all of these borderland places have surprising riches and revelations. They are places that should be cherished wisely.

A haggard is exactly that sort of place. It also evokes grief, and something untameable (and it was an insult usually applied to a woman perceived to be beyond domestic control), which turned out to be more relevant to the themes of the book than I expected when I started!

The first section of Haggards is called Wild-Crafted. It has poems about wild land, and what you might find there, about grief and resilience, and new, or recovered old, ways of learning and seeing the world. The second is called Materia Medica, and has poems about the individual herbs, the many different ways we think about them, and the different kinds of healing they offer, some of which have nothing to do with physical health, but with connection and creativity. The last section is The Wren in the Ash Tree, but I’ll leave that for next time. It’s a big beast of a poem. It will take a while —

In the meantime, Happy New Year!

January 4, 2018
Equinoctial

It’s been a busy time, and as befits the equinox, it’s been divided between wrapping up old projects and planning something new.

I’ve been doing a few readings. This is a picture from the Falkirk Storytelling Festival (picture by Sweet P of the Write Angle), a great event, and one of four I’ve been at in the last ten days. The biggest was the National Poetry Day event organised by the Federation of Writers (Scotland) at the GOMA

where Andy Jackson unveiled a patchwork poem composed by members on the theme of freedom. You can see the poem here.

In between times, I’ve finished giving this website a makeover, adding pages for workshops, readings and newsletters, updating the poems on the poetry page, and generally putting my house in order before the launch of Haggards, which will be at the Scottish Poetry Library on 10th February next year.

Last time I had a book out The Territory of Rain didn’t get as much love as I would have liked because my family were busy exploring the wilder outreaches of the NHS (I now know a lot more about neurology than I ever wished to!). This time, I would like to do a bit better. Haggards has been a long time in the brewing and I would like to give it a bit more care and attention, organise some events, take it to new places, share it with some new people. There will be a little more about it in the coming months, but hopefully, not too much.

That’s because I’m also building on it to develop something new. As well as making over the website, I’ve been making over the garden, clearing and tidying, deciding what each plant needs to thrive. I’ve discovered problems with rust and thrips and aphids, and I need to up my game to grow my herbs well. I’ll be growing fewer plants, but choosing the ones that have some special resonance. As well as the herbs for scent, for healing and cooking, I’m going to grow some traditional dye plants, bog myrtle, madder, woad and dyer’s greenweed, easing my way into the colour and craft poems, and bringing together all the work I’ve done on inhabiting this small territory.

The wind has been fierce today, after the wet of yesterday, and we are well into autumn. The bird feeders are out and the hedges are alive with sparrows and bluetits. The last field has been mowed and I’m dealing with the apple harvest, making cakes and rosehip jelly, and mincemeat for Christmas. The last of the summer birds have gone, and the geese are beginning to arrive. The tomatoes are being harvested and the bulbs for spring are going in. It isn’t quiet, it isn’t the end. Autumn is a season that faces both ways, and I love it.

October 2, 2017

Latest Posts

Blog Categories

Archives by Date

Newsletter

Tag Cloud