"Brimming with images of body, blood and flowers, this sequence politicises and analyses the purpose and process of birth"

Nice to get a review of Our Real Red Selves in the Scottish Review of Books which you can read here. 

It was a pleasure to read again with Harry Giles and Jennifer Williams as we read in Edinburgh from Our Real Red Selves at the Edinburgh Fringe Book Festival run by the amazing gem of a bookshop Word Power Books. There are free book events going on there every day till the end of the month, well worth a visit.


I was invited by the editor of Berfrois to contribute a poem to an e-book collection of poems called Poets for Corbyn. I submitted a poem that was originally published in my pamphlet collection, Vintage Sea, called The Red Road. I wrote it in 2010 after reading about a triple family suicide - three Russian asylum seekers who leapt to their death from one of the infamous multi-storey flats on the Red Road in Glasgow, their application to remain in the UK had been refused. 
You can read Poets for Corbyn here - it's free and includes poems by great poets such as Pascale Petit and Michael Schmidt.



When I was at Word Power Books I was delighted to pick up a signed copy of Kathleen Jamie's selection of essays Sightlines which I've been meaning to get for years. The writing is even more beautiful than I had imagined, delighted with it. This morning, inspired by Jamie's writing, I wrote the first draft of a reflective essay on visiting Culloden last month. It's the first such essay I've written and so very much enjoyed writing it. I feel it's possibly a new doorway opening to me. 

The house is just about ours, finalising the last few details on the contract etc and we get the keys on Friday 13th (!!!) of April!!!

"An airy, visceral mood permeates her work, which captures the narrator’s unhurried gaze" 

I was delighted yesterday when someone facebooked me to say that Vintage Sea had been reviewed in this month's Scottish Review of Books, a quarterly pull-out mag in The Glasgow Herald. You can read it on-line here. I'm reviewed alongside poets like Elizabeth Rimmer and Gerry Cambridge whose work I much admire. There are some criticisms of my pamphlet, which I can't say are unjustified, such as: "it can be argued that the poems in Vintage Sea feel too similar to each other". Very pleased to have been reviewed.

Also, my six wee poems are now up on the new Shadow Train. I'm delighted to have some poems up there alongside Claire Crowther and Rupert Loydell no less!!