So I feel I may have finally completed the manuscript for my third poetry collection. 

My idea earlier this year of splitting the collection into three parts each prefaced with a quote has been abandoned! I have come up with a new book title (and feel fairly set on it) - googled it and checked on Amazon to make sure there were no other books by that title. 

The spirit of Transtromer has been my guiding poet through many of these poems - in fact I wonder if I'll ever be able to write a poem again without having his work open in front of me for inspiration! 

Undoubtedly I'll probably add a few more poems to it between now and eventual publication - whenever that may be - but right now it feels pretty complete. 

And I feel set free to do something different...change direction...have a new focus in my poems. Perhaps a large scale project of some sort...I like the idea of having a specific book-length project for my next book. 

However, the immediate focus is on submitting my manuscript to poetry publishers, tricky... as many are not accepting submissions at the moment because their publishing schedule has been disrupted by Covid. 

However, my baby is ready to be sent out into the world, and it's an exciting place to be!

I write best when I have a theme to work on, a project bigger than individual poems. For me, poems happen in that tension when two or more separate strands are brought together and in their coming together create a movement, an energy towards something new.

Part of my process is gathering notes, images, observations over many months until the theme, idea, the other strand reveals itself and then the 'gatherings' can be brought together and the poems can be finally written. 

Yet, there are also occasional poems that spring out of nowhere, appear with their own internal dialectic, and therefore can be written / drafted immediately. 

In reading the introduction by Robin Fulton to his translation of Tomas Transtromer's Collected Poems I noted some quotes about Transtromer's poems that particularly interest me:

"And this fascination with the borders between sleep and waking, with the strange areas of access between an everyday world we seem to know and another world we can't know in the same way but whose presence is undeniable - such a fascination has over the decades been one of Transtromer's predominant themes."

"imagery from and about dreams, speculations about how both past and future can impinge upon the present, investigations into memory, and a fascination with the many ways in which borders, open and closed, may be experienced." 

And this quote from Transtromer himself:

"but you could at least say that I respond to reality in such a way that I look on existence as a great mystery and that at times, at certain moments, this mystery carries a strong charge, so that it does have a religious character, and it is often in such a context, that I write." 

I feel like I am forever looking for the next project, next theme which will unlock the writing process and make use of all my 'gatherings'. I feel a constant pull back to folklore and folktales hence my ballad poems. I also like to write in the voice of historical / mythical women and find a real freedom in adopting personas. However, I  think my real fascination in reading and writing poetry is, and always has been, in the meeting place of the natural and the psychological worlds; the internal and the external and how each colours each. 

It seems I'm in love with the Russians at the moment! I've moved on from Tsvetaeva's poems to Boris Pasternak's. I recently ordered his selected poems and I am loving them. The vitality of his voice and attention to nature makes his poems a big hit with me. I've also been reading all the poems I can find of Jules Laforgue online which is not that many, so that'll be the next book for ordering.


I've recently read two excellent books about poetry which I highly recommend - Eavan Boland's A Journey of Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, and Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva. I'm sure I'll re-read both of these books many times.


Well we're definitely into my favorite autumnal season - usually a very creative time for me. I've just finished a poem about rowan trees - my favourite trees! I seem to have written a fair number of tree poems over the last year.


I still keep Transtromer's poems permanently next to me - will I be able to write without his inspiration ever again??!! And I've been reading from my Collected Works of Lorine Niedecker and spent this evening playfully working on a condensery style history of Dunoon - a series of verses written in a sort of collage of quotations and factual information with lots of white space around. It was fun working a little differently.

I've had two poems accepted for publication by Poetry Salzburg Review - very happy that one of the poems is a longish one about Inveraray Castle!