I was delighted to read a very kind review of Madame Ecosse in the latest issue of The North magazine. The reviewer, John Killick, very kindly sent me a copy of the magazine via my local bookshop as it turned out he had bought my book actually here in Dunoon during a visit to the area! Anyway it was a very pleasant and unexpected surprise since Madame Ecosse has been out for over three years now. 

I was also very happy to have a poem commended in the Buzzwords Poetry Competition judged by Penelope Shuttle. I've always been an admirer of Shuttle's poems and to have a poem of mine read and commented on by her in the judges report is such a pleasure to me. My poem 'The Telephone Box' can be read here alongside the winning poems. I particularly love Penny Boxall's beautiful runner-up poem. 

"Scottish nationalist and feminist perspectives are refracted through a singular imagination drawn to the elemental... McCready is interested in the mysteries of birth and death, the mutability of matter, nature, myth, female experience and history as narrative of women's lives."

Delighted to read a review of Madame Ecosse in the latest issue of Poetry Review. It was reviewed by Ellen Cranitch and paired with her review of Dalgit Nagra's latest collection, which was an honour.

I'm also super-pleased to have a poem accepted for an anthology of poetry commemorating the centenary of W.S Graham - I'm so pleased to see W.S Graham and his work remembered, he is my favourite Scottish poet and I would love to see his work better known and his talent recognised.

A busy season of work and study has left little time for poetry so I'm sitting on the bare bones of at least four poems waiting on serious attention. Thankfully the busy season is coming to an end so I'm hoping to get stuck back into writing soon!

Last month a poem from Madame Ecosse was Poem of the Week in The Scotsman Newspaper (thanks to Colin Waters of the Scottish Poetry Library!).

I've been plodding away working on some occasional poems alongside some ballads. I have four poems on the go at the moment and finding it good to be able to switch between poems when I get stuck on one.

Reading-wise I've been enjoying reading Siren by Canadian poet Kateri Lanthier and I've just got around to picking up a copy of Jane Kenyon's Selected poems from Bloodaxe. Still enjoying Kinnell's Selected - some stunning poems in there. I re-read Jay Parini's book on Theodore Roethke which truly is a wonderful read.

I'm between odd jobs at the moment and hate the lack of routine and uncertainty though all should be resolved in the next month. I've applied to do Counselling Skills - a part-time course at Strathclyde Uni starting later this year. My plan is to train as a professional counsellor part-time over the next three years which I'm excited about but a little daunted by the thought of juggling - work, family, study plus finding and clocking up the necessary volunteer counselling hours to qualify - and preserve my sanity by having writing time! I guess we'll see how it'll go!

Well it's been a busy month. A flying visit to London for the launch of Madame Ecosse - the launch went well, it was good to hear the other Eyewear poets read. I got to spend a few hours in the British Museum and in the British Library between train journeys.


Then it was a week up at beautiful Moniack Mhor with nine of this year's Scottish Book Trust New Writers awardees. It was an interesting week - we spent two of the evening reading some of our work. I particularly enjoyed hearing the prose writers as mostly I only go to poetry readings - lots of beautiful work being written.

It was great having access to the Moniack Mhor library and the northern branch of the Scottish Poetry Library which is there also.

My favourite discoveries were Anne Carson's Antigonick which is a gorgeous hardback with illustrations by Bianca Stone. Carson's translation of Sophocles' Antigone is hilarious, darkly comic and hard hitting. I loved it.
I also loved reading through the Selected Poems of Galway Kinnell and have since bought my own copy.

Between all of this, followed by a wee camping trip with the kids, I'm looking forward to not going anywhere else anytime soon!

Very happy to have my 'Twilight Sleep' poem showcased on Abigail Morley's The Poetry Shed which you can read here. It's from Madame Ecosse.

***********EYEWEAR SPRING LAUNCH************

I'm very much looking forward to launching Madame Ecosse in London this Friday -

17th March  7pm-9pm 

London Review Bookshop

There will be readings from Mariela Griffor, U.S. Dhuga, Kate Noakes, Jason Lee, Isabel Rogers, and Dick Watts of Post-Punk band The Passage.

Of course I'll be reading too! All welcome - there will be wine and beautiful books!!!

Plus it's St Patrick's Day! 

Snapshots of Madame Ecosse!!

I love to see pics of my collection out there in the big wide world - a little piece of me lives inside each one.

I'm excited to be working on a new series of poems based on old Scottish ballads. It's an idea I've been toying with for a while but just didn't have the time to throw myself into.
Now is the time and after much reading and absorbing (finally finished my close reading of the Golden Bough) I'm in writing mode.

There's something about working on a project / theme over several poems that very much attracts me - I can really get absorbed in as opposed to writing occasional poems here and there.
I hope to be working on this intensely over the next couple of months.

Thanks to the wonderful Scottish Book Trust I'm going to Moniack Mhor for a writer's retreat at the end of March with this year's intake of New Scottish Writer Awardees. It's 14 miles outside Inverness and sounds/looks amazing. It will be wonderful to have a week in the Scottish highlands away from all responsibilities just to write.

However before then I have a quick jaunt to London for the official launch of Madame Ecosse which will be at the London Review Bookshop on Friday 17th March. Also hoping to plan over the next few months reading/launches in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Signed copies available from myself (UK only) if you click on the 'buy now' button on the left!


Delighted to have the book finally in my hands and I'm over-the-moon at what a beautiful object it is! Eyewear Publishing have done a wonderful job with it - thanks especially to Todd Swift and Edwin Smet at Eyewear!

She's nearly here...

After much toing and froing Madame Ecosse is finally at the printers - I'm so looking forward to seeing the book jump out of my head (off the page) and come to life as a real thing!

I did a phone interview for Napier University student magazine about my writing which you can read the write-up of here.

I'm enjoying having time to read and start to write again. Tentatively writing notes, odd lines and images - slowing feeling my way back into writing mode. I've been reading James Wright and today I started reading Adam Zagajewski's Unseen Hand collection - wonderful wonderful poems.

So the pre-order page for Madame Ecosse is now up on the Eyewear Publishing website here with very kind and generous blurbs for it from Vicki Feaver, Harry Giles and Jane Clarke, which I'm delighted by and very grateful for!

I've finished full-time work for now which means time in my life for some much needed Poetry - reading and writing. I feel like my subconscious is bursting with poems - just need to find the right expression for it all. I want to do something all encompassing, challenging, bigger, something I can really throw myself into, beyond what I've done before. I've carved out a study corner in the house and finally have my own laptop to be able to work on poems without interruption which is wonderful!! 

However the first priority is going through the proofs for Madame Ecosse - it goes to the printers on January 15th which is very exciting! Thankfully I'm sure I made the right choice in changing the order of poems and by scrapping the sections - it feels much more like a cohesive whole.  

After a dearth of poetry this year I'm very much looking forward to being fully immersed in poetry in 2017!

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.

Working full-time with two kids doesn't leave much room for writing poetry which is why I've not been updating much. However I hope to be cutting down to part-time work in January which will be much better.

I've been glad to have the break away from writing - I wrote so much last year that it drained my inner resources so it's been good to let them build up again.

Today has been a rare day off without kids around and I have notes towards a four or five poem sequence based on Child Ballad 216 - an old Scottish ballad about a pair of lovers who drown in the Clyde. 

Here is folk singer, Kate Rusby, singing a version of the ballad -

A prose piece I wrote about visiting Culloden last year will be published in the next issue of Northwords Now - it's my first non-poetry publication!!

Instead of this October, Madame Ecosse will now be published Spring 2017 - this suits me much better, feels like less of a rush to get it out and will give me plenty of time for editing and proofreading.

I have a few readings lined up - As part of a National Poetry Day event I will be reading at the Scottish Poetry Library October 6th alongside fellow Eyewear Publishing poets Paul Deaton, Terese Svoboda, and Canadian Poet Laureate - George Elliott Clarke!! See here for more details.
I will also be reading at a Mirrorball event in Glasgow CCA on October 27th.

Life is so full of commitments and busyness at the moment that I'm not finding much in the way of writing time.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited into my son and daughter's primary school to introduce poetry to the children. It turned out to be a rather mad, busy but rewarding experience. I took classes from P1 right through to P7 getting them to write odes and riddles on topics such as the seashore to fruit and vegetables. The school are putting together a book including a poem from every child in the school in order to raise much needed funds for the school. Edwin Morgan's 'The Apple's Song' went down a treat as did Pam Ayers' 'Oh I Wished I Looked After Me Teeth'! I used lots of tips from this great article in Poetry from Rachel Zucker and started every class with writing a class poem.

I've just finished reading Jonathan Bates' biography of Ted Hughes and have moved onto Coleridge: Early Visions by Richard Holmes. According to Bates it's the last book Hughes read / was in the middle of reading when he died. It's beautifully written - really makes Coleridge come to life, cleverly weaving Coleridge's own words throughout it. I'm so enjoying going back to the Romantics. I'm also reading through the Child Ballads, I have an idea of writing my own version of some of them as a bit of a long term project - just need time and peace to get on with it!

I'm pleased that the fabulous Irish poet, Jane Clarke, whose beautifully written first collection, River, did extraordinarily well when it came out last year has written me a very generous blurb for Madame Ecosse. Vicki Feaver has also generously agreed to write one for me. It's such a kindness when poets you respect so highly agree to write a blurb for you!!

I'm excited that I'll be launching Madame Ecosse in October in Glasgow as part of Jim Carruth's Mirrorball reading series and also in Edinburgh at the Scottish Poetry Library at an Eyewear event along with other Eyewear poets.

Thanks to Paul Clyne for interviewing me for Poetry Spotlight. You can read the interview and many more interviews with poets on the website here.

I'm so pleased that the Hannah Frank estate have given me permission to use one of Hannah Frank's drawings for the cover of my new collection. Hannah Frank was a Glasgow artist whose Art Nouveau style black and white drawings I've been a fan of since I came across them a few years ago.

I've always particularly loved this drawing which is titled 'Out of the Night a Shadow Passed' and felt it would fit perfectly with the themes in my collection. You can check out more of Hannah Frank's work here.

So here's the prospective cover of Madame Ecosse, which I'm completely delighted with!

Happy that my Polphail Village poem is now up on the Scotia Extremis website which you can find here. It's been paired with a poem about the town of Cumbernauld by Irene Hossack.

I've just received and gone through the proofs for my Mary Stuart poem which will be published in Poetry in the June issue. I'm so excited about it, the proofs look great!

It's a strange feeling having submitted the new collection and now thinking where to begin again. When Tree Language was published I was in the middle of being mentored by Vicki Feaver which forced me to keep writing and was invaluable for helping me to open up my poems.
I have the ever pressing desire to work on something bigger. I so enjoyed writing the longer poems and sequences in Madame Ecosse - of really being able to throw myself into a theme / subject.
At the moment I'm rereading The Golden Bough by James Frazer - doing a close reading of it, plus Roethke's Collected and D.H Lawrence. Also reading The Divided Self by R.D. Laing which is a fascinating study, published in the 1960's, of mental illness through existential philosophy.

Madame Ecosse

I'm delighted to say that Eyewear Publishing will be bringing out my second full-length poetry collection, Madame Ecosse, this September!!!

I've been working on putting together a second collection manuscript for a while but it wasn't until I wrote what is now the title poem of the collection last week that I felt I was able to bring the poems together as a cohesive whole.

'Madame Ecosse' was a nickname given to Winnie Ewing, mother of the Scottish National Party. She was the second SNP member to sit in the House of Commons and she represented the Highlands and Islands at the European Parliament for 24 years where she gained her nickname for never missing a chance to speak up for Scotland.
I knew immediately that I wanted to write a poem about her and when I did I realised it brought together the main themes of my manuscript.

I'm so completely delighted, I never expected that the book would come out this year and I'm so happy that the excellent Eyewear Publishing are bringing it out. It's such an innovative press and the sheer quality of their books - every Eyewear book or pamphlet I've bought is genuinely a beautiful object in itself.

So now starts the process of ordering, pruning and proofreading the collection - exciting!!


Thanks to Gillian Prew for showcasing my 'Rose Hips and Thistles' poem, first published in Paris Lit Up Magazine, on her blog here.

Also happy to have my 'Magpies', 'Night Poinsettias' and 'Owl Girl' poems published in the new Glasgow Review of Books which you can read here.