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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

poetry

  • National Deaf Youth Theatre

    I hope you enjoy this clip from the National Deaf Youth Theatre. People who know my poem Word to Sign: Translating Swallows will get some idea what it is all about now!

  • Atlantic Islands Festival

    This was a big event, which I have already mentioned on Luchair (my keyboard isn’t recognising accents this morning!), and which will have ongoing resonances with a lot of my work over the next few months.

    There was a lot of interesting work in many genres and media, but particularly impressive were Richard Ashrowan’s lovely films (see more here), and the lovely Atlantic Islands Suite, which premiered on Wednesday, and which I reviewed here.

    Now I’m home for a couple of weeks, writing slate poems and star poems and grass poems, until I go to an Arvon course in August.

  • Gillian Clarke: A Recipe for Water

    Life is too short to review books you don’t like, so you can take it as read that this is good poetry.
    It’s lucid and serene, attentive and intelligent. It deals with water as sea, snow glacier and river, and talks incisively about global warming without a lot of finger-pointing and shouting. Look at this quiet but pointed conclusion to Solstice where she makes the connection between a spendthrift extravagance of Christmas lights and global warming.

    and we’ll know, for the pleasures of here and now,
    we are borrowing bling from the glacier, slipping
    Greenland’s shoulder from its wrap of snow

    No preaching, but a lovely image for a chilling fact.

    Climate change is a hot topic, but Gillian Clarke extends her consideration of water into many other dimensions. Water, in her hands, is also language, tradition, geography, relationship, connection, transformation, currency. This is easy to read poetry, but not simple.

    There are poems about other things too, birds, plants, minerals, architecture, and one about rugby, which I never thought I would be able to read with pleasure. I bought this book for the intriguing title, but I’m loving it as much for the poems about Welsh, about fire, about horsetails.

    I was looking for something appropriate to finish this review off, but didn’t really find it until I read Jamie Whittle’s book White River, where he says “when you start studying a river, you begin to see that it is connected to everything else on the planet”.

    This is exactly the feeling I got from Gillian Clarke’s book.

  • The Neil Gunn Competion

    Not to boast, but to reveal this beautiful certificate – check those Pictish fishes!
    Seriously, though, I had a wonderful day in Inverness yesterday at the Award Ceremony for the Neil Gunn Writing Competition. It was held in the Town House, a stone building of such grace and friendliness it puts the average council offices to shame, and was a joy from start to finish. There were several categories to the competition, and special mention should go to Thurso High School which provided an impressive proportion of the secondary school winners. Then we got to the poetry. I can’t recommend highly enough James Knox Whittet’s overall winning poem Cuttings, but the others were excellent also.

    There was an excellent lunch after that, when I was able to talk to two of the other winners,Great guys, both, in very different ways) and to Jon Miller, who turned out to be the person who accepted the poems for last year’s Northwords Now.

    And then I met Katharine Stewart! I’ll write more about her on Lúcháir, I think, but she has been a favourite writer of mine for about twenty years. She is coming up to ninety-five now, and was so kind to me when Paul asked if I could be introduced, though a little bemused, I think by my enthusiasm.

    It was perfect weather, and Inverness was green and peaceful under the sun and wind. Three of us later bumped into each other at Leakey’s, The justifiably famous second-hand bookshop – how could we be in Inverness and not go to Leakey’s?

    Thanks should go to the Neil Gunn Trust for setting up the competition and to all the funders, but especially to the organiser, Area Libraries Officer Charlotte Macarthur, who was responsible for looking after everyone, making sure that the day went without a hitch, and was so helpful to everyone throughout the whole competition.

  • website down

    The company hosting my website, burnedthumb.com seems to have gone bust, taking the website with it. There will be a new one up shortly, as soon as my consultant (i.e. daughter Naomi) gets over the horrible flu she’s had.
    In the meantime, I’m preparing for a reading I’ll be giving on Sunday 5th July at the Atlantic Islands Festival . This looks like being a fabulous event – Naomi described it as ‘fantasy poets’ camp’ which is about right. The most especially interesting thing turns out to be a presentation from Jacqui McDonald about her life in folk music. Jacqui turns out to be half of the legendary folk group Jacqui and Bridie who were big in Liverpool in the early days of the folk revival, alongside the Spinners, Pete MCGovern (who wrote the Liverpool Lullaby that Cilla Black sang) and Brian Jacques who later went on to write the Redwall series of children’s books.
    Back in the day when I had delusions that I would be a folk singer, I sang in Jacqui and Bridie’s club. Can’t remember what we did for the life of me. I Once Loved a Lad, and Lizzie Lindsay, probably, or Ewan McColl and Irish rebel songs (gave up on them later when things got too serious) or drinking songs or sea shanties – couldn’t get away from them in Liverpool then. I think I played tin whistle then too. Now I only play for my grand-daughter!

  • From Wood to Ridge Sorley Maclean

    Or Somhairle Macgilleain as he would have written it in Gaelic. The book I’ve been reading is the Penguin collection of poems with a simultaneous translation From Wood to Ridge. It is beautiful and powerful, and completely gives the lie to people who see Gaelic as an archaic language only fit for conveying pastoral nostalgia, dealing as it does with love, war, and the politics of an uncompromisingly modern conflict between the personal and political.
    I confess it leaves me almost speechless. It’s always hard to evaluate a poetry that is not in its original language – you can’t be sure how much of what you are getting was in the original intention and how much has been filtered out, or imported in, by the process of translation.
    It’s possible that you can get an enriching, two poems for the price of one, by translating – as I put it in a poem called Translating Swallows ” I warm my thought at another mind’s fire.” You can see this in Seamus Heaney’s Midnight Verdict, for instance, where you get Heaney as well as Ovid and Brian Merriman – and in fact you get three, there because the juxtaposition of extract from The Metamorphoses and The Midnight Court also allows the two poems to comment on each other and create a third vision.
    But the problem with Sorley Maclean’s poetry is that it is such a powerful synthesis of poetic form, language, land and culture, that I can’t get much out of it without feeling overwhelmed by how much I’m missing. I can’t help feeling that all poetry should aspire to this.
    Here is a link to the official Sorley Maclean website.

  • wilderness poetry

    I had the feeling that I blogged about Chinese rivers-and-mountains poetry before, but maybe that was on Lúcháir. Last year at the Callander poetry festival Larry Butler and Colin Will introduced me to the concept of ‘wilderness poetry’ and Larry recommended Mountain Home, an anthology of this sort of thing, edited and translated by David Hinton.

    I loved it. It has a lot in common with what I’m trying to do with my ‘gleam of light on water’ poems – Hinton sums it up as ‘clarity and simplicity, silence and open emptiness’. It is elegant and spare, full of beautiful natural images and profoundly philosophical, which I love.

    The poems in this collection were written between 365 and 1206 – about contemporary with the late Latin and goliard poets of Europe. Both respond to major cultural and economic collapse by a retreat to rural solitude and reflection. Wang Wei reminds me a bit of Hilary of Poitiers, both on their rural farms, missing companions of their youth, both reflecting on loss and change.

    The differences in philosophy seem less stark than you would first think. The school of Chartres and the Victorines would have had less bother with the ‘ten thousand things’ than your average post-Descartes twenty-first century thinker or post- Romantic poet. The chief difference, even with the greenest of us, is that we still tend to think and write about nature in the context of human needs and aspirations, whereas wilderness poetry puts the human firmly in the context of nature. Less alienating than haiku, less self-regarding than the Romantics, it offers a discipline of thought and response that I find very appealing. It’s the nearest I get, in poetry, to the Irish tradition of sean nos singing.

    The major difference I find between China and Europe is that in Europe poetry and philosophy fell into the hands of what seem, compared with the Chinese, very young and passionately enthusiastic people. The Chinese poets are older, more reflective, sometimes bitter, sometimes compassionate, often melancholy. By contrast the goliards seem relatively brash and immature, passionate, undisciplined, but fresh lively, adventurous. I’m going to learn a lot from the Chinese, but I think my heart is with the goliards.They sound a note which I don’t get from Wilderness poetry, but which I need. Delight.

  • Digging for Bait


    Picture by Paul Rimmer, a rock pool at Ardnamurchan.

    This is one of the poems from The Eurydice Rising sequence, which was published in poetry Scotland last year. It has a lot of Shetland references because I was originally inspired by the Shetland ballad King Orfeo, (it’s quoted in the first stanza), in which Orpheus is a piper, and actually gets Eurydice back. The title is also a Shetland reference. If you don’t want to tell where you got your bait for fishing you would say Sjussamillabakka or stakamillabakka – as non-committal as you could get!

    Digging for Bait

    Sjussamillabakka –
    Da notes o’ joy.
    Stakkamillabakka –
    Da notes o’ noy.
    Sjussamillabakka –
    Da god gabber reel,
    dat meicht ha’ made a sick hert hale.

    Sjussamillabakka-
    Between the sea and the shore.
    Stakkamillabakka –
    Between the rocks and the shore.
    Sjussamillabakka
    Is where I got this poem,
    On water-polished shingle, where the sea
    Drains bubbling
    Over ribbed and wrinkled sand
    And popping bladderwrack.
    I found it in a rock-pool, cold as shadow,
    With a gull’s feather floating in it,
    And a thin blue sheen of petrol
    Hazed like a mussel shell.

    Sjussamillabakka –
    The place without landmarks.
    Stakkamillabakka –
    Don’t look back.
    Sjussamillabakka –
    Never the same place twice.

  • Nigh-No-Place

    I’m just re-reading Jen Hadfield’s Nigh-No-Place because I’m going to see her read on Thursday at SCoP, Stirling University on Thursday. I’m finding them very interesting, they start arguments in my head, conversations about geography and poems about wind and rock-pools.
    For all the collection is called Nigh-No-Place, the poems seem very much rooted in the places she is in, Alberta or Shetland, growing from deep awareness of the specifics of weather and landscape – snow, wind and hail, ‘hacked wet chunk of mountain,”fences strung with trembling streamers’.
    They are embodied sensual poems, full of light, sound and movement, popping gravel and ice in a glass like the notes of a mandolin, like the sound of a train passing, swirling hail, the way the salmon’s sinuous fighting upstream echoes the movement of the river’s meanders, the blinks of sunlight you register a lot when warmth is fitful and fickle.
    I especially liked Daed-traa :
    ‘I go to the rock-pool at the slack of the tide
    to mind me what my poetry’s for’
    which is fabulous.
    It reminds me a lot of my Digging for Bait, – one of the Eurydice Rising poems, which makes me think again about the myths I was hatching about the differences between male and female attitudes towards the writing of poems. I might post it here later, but not today. Today I want to make you think about Jen Hadfield’s poems. Go read some.

  • all gone quiet

    It’s cold. It hasn’t snowed much to complain about here, we’re too close to sea level, but the three and a half snowflakes that did fall are still sitting among the snowdrops and fennel stems because the ground is too cold and hard to melt them. I’m putting together a sequence of Irish poems into a collection called Rushlight. There are more of them than I realised.
    All the sick people here are getting better – the grand-daughter is even well enough to begin pinching food from other kids’ plates at nursery. The house is gradually becoming less silted up with redundant paperwork, books, utensils that might be useful one day and invoices for things we no longer possess. I even started gardening again, until the snow came back, and now the ground is too hard.
    Meantime the rest of the country seems to have totally seized up.

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