Sunday, October 16, 2016

My short reflective essay on last year's visit to Culloden is in the new Northwords Now and can be read here. It's my first tentative step into non-poetry writing and was a pleasure to write - a descriptive piece closely related to writing poems but communicating something that I couldn't get across in a poem.
I think I'll be writing more pieces like this alongside my poems - in fact I've already begun another
about my visit to the Mary Stuart's chambers in Holyrood Palace last week - an immensely moving place to visit (the chambers specifically, not the palace!). I wish I could have shut out all the other tourists and had the rooms to myself for a while.

So Madame Ecosse is forthcoming February '17 - last week I reordered the entire collection. Originally it was going to be in three sections but the selecting of poems for the first two sections seemed arbitrary with a number of poems, so then I put the collection into two sections - Garden Songs and The Birth Files - but even these sections niggled away at me.
I noticed with Tree Language (which was in three sections) that reviewers would quite happily ignore an entire section in reviewing the book. I guess I wouldn't like The Birth Files poems to be ignored - they are on a tricky subject after all - and I'm suspicious that relegating them to a section at the end of the book would cause them to be easily ignored.
I'm not entirely sure the new order is the finalised deal - I'll need a couple of weeks before I can objectively look at it again.

Like everything else - no readings for ages then they all come at once!
I'll be reading alongside J.O. Morgan, Vicki Husband and Em Strang at -

St Mungo's Mirrorball Showcase 5
Thursday 27th October
CCA Clubroom, Glasgow, 7pm

I'll also be reading at the third Dunoon Book Festival alongside Tariq Latif -

30th October 12.30 pm
Dunoon's Victorian Pier Building

I recently ordered The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough by John B. Vickery - a second-hand ex-uni library book that has clearly never been opened. It looks specifically at the influence of The Golden Bough on Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Lawrence. I can't wait until January when I can really get into my study of The Golden Bough and work out what kind of poem(s) I'm going to feed it all into.

3 comments:

Alan John Stubbs said...

Hi Marion,

Looking forward to reading Madame Ecosse when it is published. Regarding your thoughts on structure (3 sections or 1?) - I wouldn't pay too much attention to the critics. More often than not they are wrong in the long run. I was visiting my daughter in Madrid and there is a street there were at one end of the street there is the preserved fully intact, fully furnished house of Spain's own Shakespeare - a massively popular and critically acclaimed playright / poet of the 17th century - who of course is now unknown and unread. At the other end of the street there is only a small plaque on the wall to indicate that here is the site of the house (long since demolished) of Cervantes - translated into every possible language and author of perhaps the best none character in literature. Only you know what structure is best. Hoping all's good, Alan.

Alan John Stubbs said...

Spelling errors - where and known

Marion McCready said...

Thanks Alan, hope all is well with you!I'm glad I made the structural changes - I think the sections were a hangover from Tree Language that had to be got rid of! Wishing you all the best for Christmas and the new year - and for lots of poetry in 2017!