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.

So Dunoon now has its own annual book festival!

I so enjoyed hearing Liz Lochhead read in Dunoon Cinema on Friday night, Vagabond Voices fiction and TV drama writer (including writing for Taggart!!!) Chris Dolan read with Vagabond Voices publisher Allan Cameron last night. Today I heard Jess Smith tell stories about her life and about the Scottish travelling community as well as sing a couple of traditional gypsy songs. I also read today to a super friendly audience with Tariq Latif - it was good to try out my new Dunoon pier poem and Mary Stuart poem.

I was pleased to be mentioned in The Scotsman the other day amongst writers reclaiming childbirth as a legitimate source of inspiration!

I've been doing a lot of unedited writing - just writing pages and pages of images and lines - without cleaning them up into poems. I'm waiting on a new theme, bigger picture to work on and bring all of these images and thoughts into. I'm always looking to move onto something hopefully bigger and better, to really expand my writing.

I'm so enjoying reading and re-reading Theodore Roethke's On Poetry and Craft - so many great quotes from him which I've been twittering occasionally!

I received my contributors copy of Paris Lit Up in the post the other day - what a gorgeous book and collection of poems, stories and artwork!

I've been working on a series of childbirth poems based on the experiences of women in the early twentieth century and earlier of medical intervention in childbirth. I happened to be reading up on the work of filmmaker Irene Lusztig when I came across the very interesting and rather gruesome history of medical intervention in childbirth. It's a debate that still rages today and people have very strong feelings about.

The poems took me by surprise. I found references to childbirth creeping into my poems rather consistently over this last year and yet didn't feel I could explore it as a subject fully in an original way.
Suddenly I found a new way to write about childbirth through the personae of women who experienced rather dreadful medical interventions. So I've been a bit obsessed about reading up on terrible childbirth experiences! So far I have eight poems in the sequence and I feel there are a few more to come at least.

I've also been utterly delighted by Jay Parini's book on Roethke. A fantastic analysis of Roethke's poems, influences and the theory behind them. It's been a lot to take in and a book I'll be reading over several times. I feel it's answered a lot of my questions about Roethke and Plath's writing - about the role of mysticism, mythology and the transcendentalism of the American Romantic tradition.

I've been on a roll of garden poems for a while now, in fact I think my garden has taken on a bizarre life and mythology of its own which I'm happy to tap into for as long as the poems last!

I've been knee-deep in reading some wonderful books recently. I had a buying splurge and bought a bunch of books I've been dying to read for ages:
Airmail: The letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Transtromer, Fauverie and Heart of a Deer by Pascale Petit, and the excitingly amazing African Folktales and Sculpture by Paul Radin.

Any Plath fan will recognise the Radin book which according to Ted Hughes had a huge influence on the poems Plath wrote at Yaddo. I've been wanting to pick up a copy of the book for ages and managed to get a second-hand ex-library copy. The book is huge and full of wonderful stories and large photos. It was exciting to come across The City Where Men Are Mended - a Hausa folktale, and see how Plath weaved the African mythology into her own personal mythology in her Poem for a Birthday.

I read Airmail very quickly, it wasn't quite as good as I was hoping it would be. Very much a friendship played out in letters and particularly good if you're interested in translation but otherwise I didn't find it to be particularly revelatory about either Bly or Transtromer's poetry.

It's so good to have Pascale Petit's new collection (with an absolutely gorgeous cover) and catch up with one of her older collections. I'm happily reading them slowly and continually and probably will be for the next while. Still also reading Roethke and Bhatt - which have become my staple reading and I don't see that changing for the foreseeable future.

random photo - eagle carving at Arrochar!

I've been reading Theodore Roethke over the summer and though I'd read some of his poems before it's only now that they've really gripped me. The use of imagery from the natural world to intensely explore the psychological inner world, the adoption of folk beat and childish rhymes and language in order to break through to the deeper recesses of the mind I've found to be utterly fascinating and in line with what I'd been trying to work towards without really knowing that's what I've been trying to do!

It's the last week of the summer holidays and it has been a full-on summer of trying to keep the kids busy and entertained which has meant little time for writing though I've been working on a few poems and managed to read quite a bit. This year Ruby goes to school and everything changes for me - for the first time in seven-and-a-half years (since my eldest was born)  I'll no longer spend the majority of the day with a young child at my heels. A bittersweet feeling, didn't realise how much my subconscious was dwelling on it until it came out unexpectantly in a recent poem.
Much has changed in the last seven years, back then I thought when the kids went to school I would go back to studying and do a phd in political philosophy, but now all I really want to do is read and write poems! I will have to get a job though and had in the past had been involved in one-to-one tutoring in adult literacy which I really enjoyed and I'm looking to get back into again - I've spoken to the local community adult learning centre about doing some sort of creative writing class and they're very keen on the idea. But initially I guess I'm going to have a lot more time on my hands!

I was delighted with this brilliant review of Tree Language from Kirsten Irving which you can read on the Sidekick Books website here.

I went through to Edinburgh last week to record a podcast at the Scottish Poetry Library with Colin Waters, really enjoyed it - very much like a conversation rather than an intense interview, and Colin asked some really interesting / thoughtful / challenging questions - I only hope I didn't waffle too much in my responses! Wonderful to be in a library of entirely poetry-related books, so difficult choosing just six to borrow! Plus they have a good number of poetry mags and journals and I'm such a fan of Sujata Bhatt now that despite reading and re-reading her decent-sized volume of collected poems over the last four months I was so delighted to come across four new poems by her in the latest PN Review!

So the books I got out the library are -

• Theodore Roethke: The Journey from I to Otherwise - Neil Bowers
• The Terrible Threshold - Stanley Kunitz
• Translations from the Natural World - Les Murray
• Collected Poems - Lynette Roberts
• Selected Poems - Laura Riding
• Abyssophone - Peter Redgrove

The influence of Roethke on Plath's poetry is no secret, however in an essay by Roger Elkin, 'Hidden Influences in the Poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath', Elkin explores the idea that Roethke's poetry and creative theories greatly influenced Hughes also.
It's a fascinating essay detailing not only the similar themes and techniques such as animism and minimism and use of Jungian symbolism in the poetry of all three but also the role/purpose of poetry to tap into and explore the primitive, pre-conscious thus universal self. He obviously analyses Plath's 'Poem for a Birthday' but also thoroughly analyses Hughes' 'Wodwo' in the light of Roethke. You can find the essay here.

Roethke and Kunitz

This week I've been reading what I can of Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz online. I don't own any of either poets' poetry collections and this is where I really miss access to a uni library. However there's no shortage of stuff on both poets online. I've glanced at Roethke's poems before but not really read them properly. Reading the poems of his that are available online I can't help but see the influence of his work on Plath's poems.
It's a well known fact that Plath was greatly influenced by Roethke, especially his 'Greenhouse Poems' on which she based her sequence 'Poem for a Birthday', a pivotal turning point poem in her writing. I'm enjoying them and particularly interested in how he explores his personal themes, in part, through a kind of surreal personification of nature, something I've always enjoyed in Plath's writing. You can see this in Roethke's poem The Geranium and Plath's poem Poppies in July.

I was intrigued by this review of Stanley Kunitz's book The Wild Braid  which mentions the influence of nature and Jungian symbolism in his writing. I love this quote from the book:

'The poem has to be saturated with impulse and that means getting down to the very tissue of experience. How can this element be absent from poetry without thinning out the poem? That is certainly one of the problems when making a poem is thought to be a rational production. The dominance of reason, as in eighteenth-century poetry, diminished the power of poetry. Reason certainly has its place, but it cannot be dominant. Feeling is far more important in the making of the poem. And the language itself has to be a sensuous instrument; it cannot be a completely rational one. In rhythm and sound, for example, language has the capacity to transcend reason; it’s all like erotic play.'

Another book to add to the list of desirables!