The 1st of June has never been as sweet as this one!! I can't really believe my Mary Stuart poem is in this month's POETRY magazine (taking up a whole nine pages!!) alongside poetry greats Alice Oswald, D. Nurkse and Sinead Morrissey amongst others, yet here it is - 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/89360

I really thought of it as a lucky fluke when I managed to place three poems in POETRY magazine last year, so you can't imagine my face when I got an email last week from Don Share to say he is going to publish my six-part Mary Stuart sequence in an upcoming issue!!

To say I'm delighted is an understatement. I'm so thankful to Don Share for his willingness to give new and unknown writers like me publication in POETRY - his support of new writers in the hallowed (to me!) pages of POETRY magazine is so incredibly encouraging and surprising in the often closed and cliquey world of poetry publication.

I have a couple of poems online in The Lake - a great monthly poetry webzine, I also have a poem coming out this month in the autumn issue of Paris Lit Up - one magazine launch party I so wish I could make it to! I have a poem coming out in a Scottish issue of the Atlanta Review next spring, I think, which I'm also excited about.

So many more poems submitted and of course many many many rejections have come in...

Four weeks of the kids being back at school and I'm only now feeling the stirrings of poems, again I want to work with a theme / themes to explore through many poems rather than jump from isolated poem to isolated poem. I have a few ideas but nothing as concrete and exact as the pier sequence. Still reading D.H. Lawrence, whose poems I love the more I read! 

Very happy that my six-part sequence Poem for a Garden featured in B O D Y's UK and Ireland issue alongside poets I really admire such as Luke Kennard, Doireann Ni Ghriofa and Jon Stone amongst others.

It's the first post-Tree Language poem I've had published so it's exciting to have one of my new babies out there!

I was amused to come across my poem recordings for Poetry (which are now available on the Poetry Foundation website as part of their Poem of the Day series) as part of a beats and poets set where I'm reading to some cool beats at around the 12 and 22 minute marks! :)

Finally it has reached Dunoon!! -

I was asked to contribute a recent book reading list for the Poetry Foundation blog which you can read here. Mostly still mulling over the same books with the inclusion of W.S. Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius and Vicki Feaver's poetry. For those not on facebook or twitter you can hear a wonderful series of radio essays here by five different poets doing their own take of Rilke's Letter to a Young Poet. I so enjoyed them, especially (of course) Vicki Feaver's essay to a young woman poet which was amazing for me to hear and read (I was lucky enough to have seen her first draft of the essay). 

It's the end of my year as a Scottish New Writers Awardee and what a wonderful year it has been. I have two meetings left with Vicki Feaver and I'll be sad when they're over. As an end-of-year finale the Scottish Book Trust has put together a Showcase Event where all the 2013 award winners will do a short reading of their work in front of an audience which will include publishers as well as the new 2014 award winners. That's this Thursday (30th Jan) 7.30pm at Summerhall in Edinburgh if anyone is interested (it's free!).