Photo credit: fourthandfifteen / Flickr

A few weeks ago I was commissioned to write a essay on Burns Night for Stranger's Guide - a new American-based travel magazine. 

Dunoon has a particular connection to Robert Burns so I enjoyed writing this short, reflective piece which you can read here - 'Burns Night: Raising a Toast to Scotland's Bard'.

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!

Hello blogger, my old friend. I've come to talk with you again...

It's been rather busy since I've updated. The most miraculous news is that after all these years of writing alone on my little peninsula I've finally come across some other local poets and we have formed a monthly poetry work-shopping group. Wonderful to get a chance to meet up and talk poetry with real live people - there are four of us and bizarrely we all live within two streets of each other!

Dunoon hosted it's first Mini Book Festival which I read at with Tariq Latif - it was a good opportunity to try out some of the new poems. Hoping it'll be the first of an annual local book festival which would be wonderful. Tariq and I also did a poetry reading in the summer in the local bookshop which seemed to go down well - it's so good having someone else locally to read with!

I put together a book list for the Scottish Book Trust of some of my favourite contemporary female poets which you can read here.

I was pleasantly surprised to come across a lovely five star review of Tree Language on Amazon. It feels wonderfully good to get the feedback and simply that my book has found a happy home in some complete stranger's life!

Very pleased to have some poems in Be The First To Like This, an anthology of new Scottish poetry with a foreword written by Liz Lochhead. Colin Waters from the Scottish poetry library (editor of the anthology) has put together a great webpage for it here. It's being launched next week in Glasgow and Edinburgh and tomorrow we're all getting our picture taken at the Scottish Poetry Library for the Saturday Herald and Sunday Herald Magazine, so that's quite exciting!

Next month I'll be reading and chatting at the Portobello Book Festival in Edinburgh as part of a Scottish Book Trust event along with two other recipients of the SBT New Writer's Award. Check out the dates of the book festival here and if you're around please come along - I've heard there will be wine!

Finally, good old Highland Mary's voting yes and so am I. Only four more days until the referendum and it's all up for grabs!!

I've never been able to write on demand, well I could but the result wouldn't be pretty or worth much. Unlike swiss, who seems to have little problem turning his daily life into poetic epiphanies, I sit on my reams of imagery waiting for the 'thing' that's going to give it substance and meaning. So that, probably laziness, and the endlessness of household chores are my excuses for not having any new poems to post at the moment.

I'm not much of a short story reader but lately I've been devouring Robin Jenkins' book of short stories -Lunderston Tales. It has to be an excellent writer who makes you look at people differently and even value them more than you did previous to reading their work. I love Robin Jenkins' stories, they make me laugh, give me insights into the life and thinking of people around me. They are literally about the people around me. Jenkins spent the last thirty years of his life living just outside of Dunoon, where I live. His fictional stories are based on real people and people I recognise. These people exist everywhere of course but luckily for me Jenkins' stories are very much based locally which means when I walk down town I imagine I could be living in one of his stories.

Incidentally, Brown's latest gaffe reads like it's straight out of a Robin Jenkins story! - 'The Pensioner and the Prime Minister'.