I recorded another video poem for Hugh McMillan's fab #plagueopoems series which are now being showcased weekly by Dumfries & Galloway and Renfrew libraries.
A poem I wrote for my daughter, 'Her Hair is a Landscape of its Own', is in the recent issue of the London Grip and can be read here.

It's been a slow return to writing after effectively a five-month summer holiday for the kids. And summer holidays have never been a productive writing time for me. I've been reading Wendell Berry's The Peace of Wild Things and I'm enjoying the quiet simplicity of the poems, the drawing back to silence as I get to experience silence at home again. I've also been re-reading Michael Hamburger's excellent book The Truth of Poetry which I've written about before. It's helping me come back to writing and thinking about what kind of poems I want to write, for what purpose, and how I conceive of my writing in terms of the tradition of poetry and how that translates into poetry of the present. I wrote a poem about cobwebs this week - my first completed poem since April!

It's a real pleasure when a poem written in the solitude of me and my laptop travels so much further than I could have expected.
I was happy to receive my contributor copy of Poetry Ireland Review with my Moniack Mhor poem - it was the poem I had stuck in at the end of my submission to bolster it and the one, I assumed, would be least likely to be taken.

Last week I received a lovely email to ask if the poem could be featured on Poetry Daily and of course I said yes so today it's up on the website - here.
Also I'm happy to have my March Snow poem in now up on the London Grip which can be read here.

It's been beautiful weather here in Argyll over the last month, I'm sure we haven't had such a warm spell for at least three years! I've been working on some orange tree poems from my notes from Spain. And thinking about counselling / therapy as I come towards the end of my counselling skills course - it's been a transformative year for me and I now know without a doubt that I want to continue training to become a counsellor. I'm interested to see how it will impact my writing in terms of themes and focus.

I've been writing steadily over the last few months so it's been a pleasantly productive period. Two poems I've written that I am particularly happy about - one about Freud's couch and a recent one about crocuses - they were pure joy to write!

I'm not long back from a nice family holiday in Spain (sun!!) and have plenty of notes for Spanish-themed poems.

I've had a poem accepted by the London Grip - a March snow poem and I will have a poem on display this weekend on a shop window in the Galloway town of Gatehouse of Fleet as part of the Big Lit Stewartry Book Festival. 

I guess I'm feeling the lack of a challenge in developing my writing at the moment, I don't want to get too comfortable in just writing poem after poem. I like to challenge myself and feel that I am growing as a writer in one way or another. I think perhaps I need to move away from reading my favourite writers for a while and challenge myself in the poetry I am reading.