Check out the new Calder Wood Press website. My poetry pamphlet collection, Vintage Sea, has now been reduced to a mere three quid along with several other pamphlet collections. A great variety of poetry for super-cheap prices!

I've decided this year to join in on NaPoWriMo. Haven't attempted it since before Ruby was born and now she's three so I thought it was about time I gave it a go! The most I've ever managed before is fourteen days of poem writing before giving up. I hope to beat my personal record this time round! It's a great way to build up draft poems to work on later.

Had a few poetry rejections in the last couple of weeks which is always deflating but one of the rejections was the nicest I've ever received using the words 'engaging' and 'tantalising' and 'delighted to read more of your work', so it's not all bad!!


Thanks to the heads-up from swiss I've recently been devouring  With Robert Lowell and his Circle.What a fascinating read and a very well written memoir. A must read for any Plath, Sexton, Bishop, Kunitz etc fan. I've gone back to reading my Selected Lowell with a lot more care and attention than I ever read it before.

I think, overall,  I feel most at home in imagist poetry, though the movement birthed and died within a few years in the early twentieth century.
I wonder if there are contemporary imagist writers out there who would define themselves as such.

"[R]ooted in the landscape and experience of Scotland. The poems are full of imagery and characters who remain almost at the edge of vision, not explained, just there"

Thanks to Juliet Wilson for her kind words about Vintage Sea on her blog here. Interesting that she assumed my poem We Met by a Charm of Crossbills recorded an actual experience of mine, not sure how she feels about the poem since I confessed I'd never seen a crossbill in my life!

McCready and Downie in Conversation

Fellow Calder Wood Press poet Morgan Downie (swiss) and I review and interview each other on our respective poetry collections. I've been reading Morgan's poetry and conversing with him via the blogs for a couple of years now and I enjoyed this wee joint venture. Morgan's first full-length poetry collection, stone and sea, was published last year and is packed with excellent poems. I was pleased to get this opportunity to ask him some questions on his collection and his answers are interesting and very Morgan!

Thanks to Michelle McGrane for featuring us on her wonderful Peony Moon blog!

"I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry" - John Cage

Unfortunately my nothing to say is not poetry. I've been feeling pretty weary over the last few weeks, it's been enough to keep up with daily life. So although I'm a bit more back to normal now I've still no new poems to work on. I did get a poem acceptance email from Gutter Magazine a few day ago which I'm really happy about, Gutter is one of my favourite literary mags.

The last few days I've been working on answering a series of questions about my pamphlet set by Jim who is going to publish them on his blog along with a review of Vintage Sea. I really had to think hard about the questions, Jim likes to get down to the heart of the matter so they were particulary thought-provoking.

I'm currently wading my way through the rather giant Penguin Book of Women's Lives. The snippet of life I've enjoyed reading the most so far is Simone De Beauvoir's taken from one of her autobiographical volumes The Prime of Life. It recounts the start of her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. It's a wonderful read, how the two young philosophers approached their life together attempting to live out  rationalist principles in their relationship. Trying to imagine the great Sartre as a young man facing off De Beauvoir's father during a confrontation. I love the personality of their relationship that comes through in the reading. Here's a paragraph taster:

"We were both as healthy as horses and of a cheerful disposition. But I took any setback very badly; my face changed, I withdrew into myself and became mulish and obstinate. Sartre decided I had a double personality. Normally I was the Beaver; but occasionally this animal would be replaced by a rather irksome young lady Mademoiselle de Beauvoir. Sartre embroidered this theme with several variations, all of which ended by making fun of me. In his own case, things very frequently got him down - especially in the morning, when his head was still foggy with sleep, or when circumstances reduced him to inactivity: he would hunch himself into a defensive ball, like a hedgehog. On such occasions he resembled a sea elephant we had once seen in the zoo at Vincennes whose misery broke our hearts...when Sartre's face took on an unhappy expression, we used to pretend that the sea elephant's desolate soul had taken possession of his body. Sartre would then complete the metamorphosis by rolling his eyes up, sighing, and making silent supplication: this pantomime would restore his good spirits."

A quick post to say my launch date has now been set (in stone!) for Friday June 17th in the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow.
I'll be reading with Calder Wood Press poet, Geoff Cooper, and there will be music on the Celtic Harp by Pauline Vallance. Can't wait!!

I'm typing from the library - I've had no internet access since Monday's gales blew a tree down on my phone line....disaster!! BT were supposed to send someone out to fix the line today but I'm not banking on it now...

What a week! We were all sick as dogs for a few days, a really nasty bug going about. But yesterday my copies of Vintage Sea arrived in the post (didn't even feel well enough to blog about it last night!). How amazing to have it in my hands! I went down to my local bookstore and, excitingly, they're going to order a bunch from Colin and stock it! 

I currently have two poems up at the Ink, Sweat & Tears webzine and Michelle McGrane is featuring Vintage Sea on her wonderful poetry blog, Peony Moon. 

One of the poems, 'Brenhilda', was inspired by The Guga Hunters by Donald S. Murray, which I bought a few months ago on my way back from Lewis. A beautifully written book about a centuries-old Hebridean tradition, a really wonderful read.

That's VINTAGE SEA, my poetry pamphlet, now available to buy from the Calder Wood Press website for a measly £5! Just click on the picture to the right and scroll down to catalogue.

It has been a labour of love which would never have happened if it wasn't for this blog and you readers who have read, encouraged and helped me workshop these poems. So thankyou! :)

Here's what these lovely people have to say about my poems:

'to read marion mccready's poetry is to enter a transformational landscape where the act of seeing is ecstatic and filled with meaning. it is not magical realism but a realism that becomes magical. i highly recommend it.' - morgan downie

'Marion McCready lives on an island which seems to be one giant metaphor. From seascapes and landscapes she creates dreamy, often startling, images, sometimes making a pithy point, sometimes nudging the reader beyond the here and now to a place more mythological and elemental. This is the first collection from a very individual voice.' - Hugh McMillan

'It is rare these days to read a first pamphlet in a voice so sure and well formed and rooted in local knowledge as Marion McCready’s, whose poems come to us drenched in the waves and mists of the Firth of Clyde and the islands off the west coast of Scotland, and yet never fail to remain responsive to the tidal surges of the universal. Whether writing of the natural world of her beloved seashore and rivers, or of the equal mysteries and deeps of love and motherhood, McCready’s poems are always both aware of the spirit and grounded in the here-and-now of a pleasurably physical sense of language as music and of the poem as a shaped and shapely object. Setting out for the islands, McCready advises that we will be able to find her “in another life / among the kittiwakes, the sea pinks, / cormorants feeding their young in my ribcage,” and we, already persuaded, are eager to follow.' - James Owens

The cover photo is by the wonderfully talented photographer / artist, Roxana Ghita. You can view more of her work here.

Yes, my pamphlet is now complete and currently at the printers. Colin says he'll be picking it up a week tomorrow. Thanks to Roxana for the use of her wonderful picture, I really can't wait to have it in my hands.
I have a provisional launch date: Saturday 21st May in Glasgow along with the launch of Geoff Cooper's lovely pamphlet Songs The Lightning Sang.

I really am too excited for words, and isn't the cover simply gorgeous??!

Vintage Sea

Yippee!!!!

I'm getting really excited about my forthcoming poetry pamphlet - Vintage Sea - which is to be published this year by Calder Wood Press. Today I wrote my author bio for the CWP website and it's now up here. I also received in the post this morning three lovely CPD collections: Heart Notes by Anna Dickie, Words, Words, Words by Jane Mary Wilde, and Setting Out by Mercedes Claraso, all of which I'm really looking forward to getting into!