This is the last blog in the series, and I thought it would be appropriate to end with rain – which won’t be as dismal as it may sound! Scotland, especially the west coast where I live (in Glasgow), is a rain-swept country. There are lots of expressive Scots words attached to weather: ‘haar’ for the mist off the sea; ‘dreich’ for dismal days (Liz Lochhead uses that word in her poem in this blog series); ‘smirr’ for a fine rain; ‘droukit’ when you’re drenched… The late and much-missed Alastair Reid, who used to write for the New Yorker and was a brilliant translator of Borges and Neruda, wrote a poem called ‘Scotland’ (https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/scotland-1) in which beautiful weather prompts a Calvinist response: […] ‘What a day it is!’ cried I, like a sunstruck madman. And what did she have to say for it? Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves as she spoke with their ancient misery: 'We'll pay for it, we'll pay for it, we'll pay for it!' Some thirty years or so after Reid published that poem, Don Paterson published his sixth collection, Rain (London: Faber & Faber, 2009). Paterson, twice winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and Queen’s Gold medallist for Poetry, is the most prominent of the poets of his gifted generation. He teaches creative writing at the University of St Andrews, is the poetry editor for Picador, and a musician. He has a Calvinist streak himself, and writes poems that are ‘Dynamic, interrogative and unsettling; crafted yet open-ended; fiercely smart, savage and stirring’ as the Guardian reviewer remarked on the publication of Paterson’s Selected Poems (2012 – there is an earlier Selected available from Graywolf, garlanded with praise from Zadie Smith and Charles Simic). In the title poem, ‘Rain’, Paterson begins: ‘I love all films that start with rain’, and no matter how ‘bad or overlong / such a film can do no wrong’: I think to when we opened cold on a starlit gutter, running gold with the neon of a drugstore sign… Despite the weather, he’s not in Scotland here – but he is in a city, and we haven’t seen much of city life in this series. Paterson has an early poem that’s distinctly urban, about sunshine and also about a father-son relationship: the title, ‘Heliographer’, wrong-foots the reader, who expects a very different poem to follow. The double-take is a frequent reader reaction to Paterson’s poems, so is the pleasure that comes from his energy of rhythm and intellect. I thought we were sitting in the sky. My father decoded the world beneath: our tenement, the rival football grounds, the long bridges slung out across the river. Then I gave myself a fright with the lemonade bottle. […] from Nil Nil (London: Faber & Faber, 1993) Paterson has also made versions of poems by Machado (The Eyes) and Rilke (Orpheus); in an interview with Attila Dosa he disagreed with Reid’s view of translating poetry – while admiring his... Continue reading

Darling You might forget the exact sound of her voice or how her face looked when sleeping. You might forget the sound of her quiet weeping curled into the shape of a half moon, when smaller than her self, she seemed already to be leaving before she left, when the blossom was on the trees and the sun was out, and all seemed good in the world. I held her hand and sang a song from when I was a girl – Heel y’ho boys, let her go boys – and when I stopped singing she had slipped away, already a slip of a girl again, skipping off, her heart light, her face almost smiling. And what I didn’t know or couldn’t say then was that she hadn’t really gone. The dead don’t go till you do, loved ones. The dead are still here holding our hands. from Darling: new and selected poems (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2007) Jackie Kay is never an aloof artist: she’s down among the difficulties with us, working things out as she writes. In the last few years she’s been writing prose and poems about her Nigerian inheritance through her father; her Scottish birth mother; her beloved adopted parents who gave her a happy, Communist childhood in Glasgow. Her humorous monologues in the character of a Scottish cartoon character can reduce an audience to tears of laughter. Love is often her theme, and ‘authenticity, allegiance, origins and memory’ as Ruth Padel comments; the pain and pleasures of loving women, of being a friend – she’s very good on friendship, as in this poem about the writer Julia Darling – of being a mother and a daughter. This poem is not specific to Scotland: it’s a poem that speaks directly to many people and I wanted to share it with you because I feel sure that you, in turn, will want to share it. It recognises the truth Auden so memorably explored in ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, that the world goes on even while someone is dropping down into death, and out of this pained recognition, something beautiful can be created. Find out more about Jackie Kay here: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/jackie-kay and hear her read here: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/jackie-kay Friends, we need your help. We need to raise £50,000 for the building renovation which will hugely extend our reach. Your gift helps us to give: to lend books; to send books, poetry postcards and poets around Scotland; to record and send poets’ voices around the world; to bring people and poems together in care homes, schools, hospitals… Go to www.justgiving.com/byleaveswegive or www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/about/support-our-workto donate online Continue reading

The Letter Always Arrives at its Destination Then I wrote often to the sea, to its sunk rope and its salt bed, to the large weed mass lipping the bay. The small glass bottles would be lined along the bedroom floor – ship green or church-glass clear – such envelopes of sea-mail. Only on the day of sending would a note be fed into each swollen, brittle hull – I had my phases: for so long it was maps: maps of wader nests, burrows and foxes’ dens, maps where nothing was in its true position – my landscape blooming from the surf. Later, I'd write my crushes' names onto the paper, as a small gift. The caps then tested and wax sealed. None ever reached my dreamed America, its milk-white shore, as most would sink between the pier and the breakwater, and I would find that I had written about the grass to the drowned sand, again; and to the sunken dark, I had sent all the light I knew. from Moontide (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2014) Moontide is Niall Campbell’s first collection: it was shortlisted for the Forward debut prize, and won him the inaugural Edwin Morgan Poetry Award for the best collection by a Scottish poet aged 30 or under, and the Saltire Award for best first Scottish book. One of the Morgan judges remarked that ‘In lightly framing the unsaid, some of these poems have a haunted quality: they are cat’s cradles between poet and reader.’ Campbell’s vision in this poem has its roots in his childhood on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, but it was inspired by quite a different source: ‘I came across a revelatory quote “the letter always arrives at its destination” in an essay on ideology in Charlie Chaplin movies. What is important to note is that the letter does not necessarily arrive at its intended destination. For me, what this pointed towards was the potential in the falling-short; how misplacement or being “lost” could actually create an opening for something else.’ The assured poems in this collection create openings onto this world and beyond it; magical poems of ‘islands and margins’. Find out more about Niall Campbell and hear him read the poem: http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/letter-always-arrives-its-destination and hear Campbell in conversation about his poetry: http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/connect/podcast/niall-campbell Friends, we need your help. We need to raise £100,000 for the building renovation which will hugely extend our reach. Your gift helps us to give: to lend books; to send books, poetry postcards and poets around Scotland; to record and send poets’ voices around the world; to bring people and poems together in care homes, schools, hospitals… Go to www.justgiving.com/byleaveswegive or www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/about/support-our-workto donate online Continue reading

Moon Last night, when the moon slipped into my attic-room as an oblong of light, I sensed she’d come to commiserate. It was August. She travelled with a small valise of darkness, and the first few stars returning to the northern sky, and my room, it seemed, had missed her. She pretended an interest in the bookcase while other objects stirred, as in a rockpool, with unexpected life: strings of beads in their green bowl gleamed, the paper-crowded desk; the books, too, appeared inclined to open and confess. Being sure the moon harboured some intention, I waited; watched for an age her cool glaze shift first toward a flower sketch pinned on the far wall then glide to recline along the pinewood floor before I’d had enough. Moon, I said, we’re both scarred now. Are they quite beyond you, the simple words of love? Say them. You are not my mother; with my mother, I waited unto death. from The Overhaul (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2015) Kathleen Jamie’s The Overhaul, which won the Costa Prize for Poetry in 2012, has recently been published in the USA. These mid-life poems are deceptively simple, less ebullient than some of her earlier work – the feisty poems of The Queen of Sheba gave voice to a generation of Scottish women not prepared to be subdued; more conversational, full of questions. Thrifty with words when confronted by spendthrift nature, ‘Her poetry is to be admired as one might a winter garden for its outline, clarity and light’, wrote the Observer reviewer; ‘Reading the collection is, on one level, the equivalent of taking a Scottish walk, observing birds, deer, sheep and the sea.’ Jamie lives in Fife, and is Chair of the Creative Writing programme at the University of Stirling.Her fine essay collections, like her poetry, examine with lyrical acuity the way humans dwell in, delight in and despoil the natural world. She is rarely as self-referential as in The Overhaul. The last lines of ‘Moon’ surprise us with their buried feeling brought to light, their deeply Presbyterian tone. Find out more about Kathleen Jamie here: http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/kathleen-jamie and hear her reading and discussing her poems http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/poetica/2012-07-14/4066098 Friends, we need your help. We need to raise £100,000 for the building renovation which will hugely extend our reach. Your gift helps us to give: to lend books; to send books, poetry postcards and poets around Scotland; to record and send poets’ voices around the world; to bring people and poems together in care homes, schools, hospitals… Go to www.justgiving.com/byleaveswegive or www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/about/support-our-workto donate online Continue reading

Hedgehog, Hamnavoe Flinching in my hands this soiled and studded but good heart, which stippling my cupped palms, breathes – a kidney flinching on a hot griddle, or very small Hell’s Angel, peeled from the verge of a sweet, slurred morning. Drunk, I coddle it like a crystal ball, hellbent the realistic mysteries should amount to more than guesswork and fleas. from Nigh-No-Place (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2008) Jen Hadfield, the youngest poet to win the T.S. Eliot Prize, ‘a beat poet of the upper latitudes’ as Kathleen Jamie described her, has chosen to settle on Shetland, over a hundred miles north of the Scottish mainland. Of English and Canadian descent, a visual as well as verbal artist, Hadfield has travelled widely in Canada and Scotland, and her poetry of these landscapes is startlingly immediate, a feat of fresh vision of ancient nature. You can see this in miniature in her description of the hedgehog (Hamnavoe is the main settlement on West Burra), kidney-shaped and clad like a motorcyclist in its studded skin. Hadfield’s linguistic exuberance has led her to explore the vocabulary of the Shetlands, particularly in her latest collection, Byssus (Picador, 2014). One title from that collection, ‘We climb the hill in the dark and the children are finally given back their iPhones’, suggests the cultures which she manages to connect, writing in the app-light as well as the long dark/light of the north. Find out more about Jen Hadfield and hear her read here:http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/jen-hadfield and on her own website:http://rogueseeds.blogspot.co.uk/ Friends, we need your help. We need to raise £100,000 for the building renovation which will hugely extend our reach. Your gift helps us to give: to lend books; to send books, poetry postcards and poets around Scotland; to record and send poets’ voices around the world; to bring people and poems together in care homes, schools, hospitals… Go to www.justgiving.com/byleaveswegive or www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/about/support-our-work to donate online Continue reading

From the Chinese Turn of the year and a white Christmas turning to slush on my neighbours’ fields crows on the high road, the yard streaked with coal dust and gritting, geraniums turning to mush in the tubs and baskets. I walk to the end of the road to ease my sciatica: ditch water, gorse bones; how did I get so cold so quickly? Thaw in the hedge and the old gods return to the land as buzzard and pink-footed goose and that daylong, perpetual scrape of winter forage; but this is the time of year when nothing to see gives way to the hare in flight, the enormous beauty of it stark against the mud and thawglass on the track, before it darts away, across the open fields and leaves me dumbstruck, ready to be persuaded. from Black Cat Bone (London: Cape Poetry, 2011) John Burnside is a prolific writer: over a dozen collections of poems, half a dozen works of fiction, several memoirs… and the way they pour out is also typical of a single Burnside poem, which poet-critic Fiona Sampson has suggested ’resemble ragas more than traditional Western forms. Their organic shapes seem generated by their material, and by the running line of phrase leading to phrase…’. The poems have strong details yet blurred outlines: the country Burnside inhabits – his native Fife, the frozen north Europe he frequently explores – is often rain-swept, seen through mist, under cloud, under water. In such landscapes, what is insubstantial becomes haunting, and unfinished stories, elusive memories, are revisited. There is an unhoused soul in this poetry, testing all sorts of boundaries. There are also birds, feral animals, and plant life: Burnside’s deep awareness of the natural world and human despoilation is key to his writing. In this poem, from a collection that won both the T.S. Eliot and the Forward prizes, there is just a hint at the end that he might believe in the possibility of the beautiful changes that spring could bring. To find out more about John Burnside, see http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/john-burnside and hear him reading at http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/travelling-south-scotland-august-2012 Friends, we need your help. We need to raise £100,000 for the building renovation which will hugely extend our reach. Your gift helps us to give: to lend books; to send books, poetry postcards and poets around Scotland; to record and send poets’ voices around the world; to bring people and poems together in care homes, schools, hospitals… Go to www.justgiving.com/byleaveswegive or www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/about/support-our-work to donate online Continue reading

Allegory On the single track roads in the Highlands we seek each other’s eyes, giving way to some, beckoned through by others, in a slow, supple dance. But down goes my foot where the double track starts as I swing away at twice – three times – the speed, aware of nothing but my own thoughts, driving free, without hindrance. Rarely need I pull in for another to pass, rarely does another wave back. Cosamhlachd Air rathaidean cumhang na Gàidhealtachd siridh sinn sùilean chàch-a-chèile ’s sinn a’ gèilleadh do chuid is gar leigeil seachad aig càch ann an dannsa sùbailte sèimh Ach sìos lem chois far an tòisich an rathad mòr agus air falbh leam aig dhà, trì, uiread an astair, gun diù do chàil ach mo smuaintean fhèin, ’s mi dràibheadh gu soar, gun bhacadh. ’S tearc a-nist a dh’fheumar stad do dhuine eile, is ’s tearc a smèideas duine air ais. from Transparencies (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2013) Meg Bateman’s first collection , Aotromachd /Lightness, made a stir when it was published in 1997. Here was a writer in Gaelic, not a native speaker (she studied Gaelic at Aberdeen University and began to write her own poetry in that language), speaking of intimate subjects in a voice that was full of insecurity and yet boldly challenged the received view of Gaelic poetry – certainly as it was received by an English-speaking audience. Anyone who has driven in the Highlands knows what Bateman, who lives on Skye, is describing in this poem, the decisions and the courtesies of negotiating a single-track road. But close communities, whether linguistic or physical, are also confining: we can read the poem as an allegory of island life, even of Scottish life; of choosing to write in Gaelic (for a community of less than 60,000 readers) or English. Mostly self-translated, Bateman’s poetry evokes both the timeless and the contemporary: love and disposable diapers. Carol Rumens has remarked: ‘The poems have the strength and simplicity of art made for a community rather than an elite, though they are far from artless.’ To find out more, visit http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/meg-bateman www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/aug/05/poem-of-the-week-meg-bateman For more poems, and to hear Meg Bateman read, http://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/iomallachd-2463#.VPN6k_msUlI Friends, we need your help. We need to raise £100,000 for the building renovation which will hugely extend our reach. Your gift helps us to give: to lend books; to send books, poetry postcards and poets around Scotland; to record and send poets’ voices around the world; to bring people and poems together in care homes, schools, hospitals… Please go to www.justgiving.com/byleaveswegive or www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/about/support-our-work to donate online Continue reading

Full Volume Diving-suited, copper-helmeted, no thought of turning back, Led by his grey lead boots way, way off the beaten track, He walks into Loch Ness. His unheard wife and daughter Stand hand-in-hand on the shore. Underwater, He ploughs on down on his own, bone-cold marathon, Stomping the loch not for any sponsorship he’s won, Not seeking front pages, nor getting caught up in some blinding Damascus flash, but just for the love of that dark, reminding Him and his folks here and all the folks Back home that, despite the old jokes, Hoaxes, photos, no-shows, and tourists’ tales, Something is in there, out there, down there, flails and dwells In inner silence. He wants to meet It, to come back dry, dripping, and greet The day from the loch’s beyond, its call Calling inside him. Wants above all To sound the loch’s full volume right at ground Level, be lost in it, pushed by it, sung by it, not to be found. from Full Volume (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008) Robert Crawford, an exact contemporary of Robin Robertson (see no.3), is passionate about Scotland – past, present and future. His poetry is nourished by his native land, its intellectual and practical achievements – especially in the sciences – and its literary heritage; he has written the best modern biography of Robert Burns (The Bard, 2009). Hugely productive as an editor, critic and poet, he is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews, and has recently published the first volume of a biography of T.S. Eliot. He has written in Scots, made versions of Gaelic poems and translated from the Latin of Renaissance Scottish poets, and is keenly attuned to the spring of rhythm and the pleasures of rhyme, as in ‘Full Volume’. Typically, this poem is both playful and questioning. Crawford knows that the myth of the Loch Ness monster feeds a profitable tourist trade, and also that beneath that surface lies something truly unfathomed, not only the second deepest loch in Scotland, but something in the human psyche that needs to resist discovery. Find out more about Robert Crawford here and hear him reading and talking in the SPL podcast series. Friends, we need your help. We need to raise £100,000 for the building renovation which will hugely extend our reach. Your gift helps us to give: to lend books; to send books, poetry postcards and poets around Scotland; to record and send poets’ voices around the world; to bring people and poems together in care homes, schools, hospitals… Every donation counts, so click http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/about/support-our-work Continue reading

The Shelter I should never have stayed here in this cold shieling once the storm had passed and the rain had finally eased. I could make out shapes inside, the occasional sound: a muffled crying which I took for wind in the trees; a wasp, stuttering there at the windowsill. I listened. What looked like a small red coat was dripping from its wire hanger. There was a shift and rustle coming from the bucket in the corner by the door;I found, inside, a crumpled fist of balled-up paper, slowly uncrinkling. On the hearth, just legible in the warm ash, my name and dates, and above that, in a shard of mirror left in the frame, I caught sight of myself, wearing something like a black brooch at the neck. Then I looked more closely and saw what it was. from Sailing the Forest: selected poems (London: Picador / New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014) Robin Robertson, editor and publisher, is one of a gifted generation of Scottish poets now in their fifties.He lives in London, but grew up on the north-east coast of Scotland, and something of its glinting granite and cold seas underlies his poetry. Mark Doty has referred to Robertson’s ‘rich and briny atmospheres, the burr and bristle of a fine ear, an eye restless for exact and searing detail’ – all of which are evident in ‘The Shelter’ – urging readers to explore the ‘dark and lustrous landscapes’ of his poems. Robertson’s recurrent persona is that of a displaced man: undone by sexual relationships, and often lost in a haunted landscape. He uses classical and Scottish myths of change and shape-shifting to powerful, sensuous effect, and I recommend ‘The Flaying of Marsyas’ and ‘At Roane Head’ as compelling examples. Robertson's collaborations with musicians, and his translations, have reinforced his attention to the precise shape of a line, to the detonating effect of one unusual word. He has won a number of prizes for his collections, including the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Find out more about Robin Robertson’s poetry here. and hear him read at: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/robin-robertson Continue reading

Kidspoem /Bairnsong it wis January and a gey dreich day the first day Ah went to the school so my Mum happed me up in ma good navy-blue napp coat wi the rid tartan hood birled a scarf aroon ma neck pu'ed oan ma pixie and my pawkies it wis that bitter said noo ye'll no starve gie'd me a wee kiss and a kid-oan skelp oan the bum and sent me aff across the playground tae the place Ah'd learn to say it was January and a really dismal day the first day I went to school so my mother wrapped me up in my best navy-blue top coat with the red tartan hood twirled a scarf around my neck pulled on my bobble-hat and mittens it was so bitterly cold said now you won't freeze to death gave me little kiss and a pretend slap on the bottom and sent me off across the playground to the place I'd learn to forget to say it wis January and a gey dreich day the first day Ah went to the school so my Mum happed me up in ma good navy-blue napp coat wi the rid tartan hood birled a scarf aroon ma neck pu'ed oan ma pixie and my pawkies it wis that bitter. Oh saying it was one thing but when it came to writing it in black and white the way it had to be said was as if you were posh, grown-up, male, English and dead. from A Choosing: selected poems (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2011) Liz Lochhead, who lives in Glasgow, is the current Scots Makar (poet laureate) and a gifted playwright, her best-known play being Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. That title suggests the way she challenges accepted power relationships, whether in history, art, or domestic life: with verve, curiosity and defiance. Success for a Scot in British society after the Act of Union in 1707 often entailed losing all trace of Scots vocabulary and grammar, but this is not a story particular to Scotland: Lochhead's poem touches all those accustomed to speaking one language at home and another in society. She published her first collection in 1972, in a very male-dominated literary environment, and went on to write dark re-tellings of myths and fairy tales, as well as humorous and touching performance monologues. As Carol Ann Duffy has written, Lochhead’s poetic voice is ‘a warm broth of quirky rhythms, streetwise speech patterns, showbiz pizzaz, tender lyricism and Scots [which] liberated a generation of women writers’. Hear Liz Lochhead reading and interviewed in this Scottish Poetry Library podcast: http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/connect/podcast/liz-lochhead-40th-anniversary-memo-spring And find out more here: http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/liz-lochhead Continue reading