I love to see photos of Tree Language
travelling around the world in different places
and in people's homes - makes me feel like little
pieces of me exist in all of these places.






Eyewear publishing is an independent, small, London-based press committed to publishing strong poetry in beautifully produced hardback collections. I'm incredibly lucky and grateful to be published by Eyewear. Like all independent poetry publishers, Eyewear is struggling financially. I think it would be sad to see Eyewear go under, not just because my book is with them, but because of their commitment to publishing good poetry regardless of fashion, their interest in publishing international poetry, and their desire to create each book as a pleasing and beautiful object in itself. Also I think their Melita Hume Prize is unusual in that it's free to enter -  anyone can submit a full collection for it.

Please have a look on their website - here - the titles from 2012-13 are on sale for £7 which is a fantastic price for the gorgeous hardbacks. There are also a selection of beautifully produced pamphlets at £5 and Eyewear's first fiction book - Sumia Sakkar's The Boy from Aleppo which was recently adapted for and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Very happy that my six-part sequence Poem for a Garden featured in B O D Y's UK and Ireland issue alongside poets I really admire such as Luke Kennard, Doireann Ni Ghriofa and Jon Stone amongst others.

It's the first post-Tree Language poem I've had published so it's exciting to have one of my new babies out there!

I was amused to come across my poem recordings for Poetry (which are now available on the Poetry Foundation website as part of their Poem of the Day series) as part of a beats and poets set where I'm reading to some cool beats at around the 12 and 22 minute marks! :)

It's taken a while but it's beginning to dawn on me that Ruby starting school wasn't just another milestone in watching my babies grow up in the way it was when Sorley started school but is actually the end / culmination of a period in my life that began when Sorley was born almost eight years ago.

The amount of daily freedom I have now is daunting and surprisingly unconducive  to writing - an overwhelming pressure to be super-productive which freezes me. However thanks to the mentoring with Vicki Feaver, this year overall has been productive for me - I'm about ten poems off another full-length collection, and I'm happy with the poems I've written - they are so much more opened up / expanded than my previous poems. Of course it'll take about another three years odd to place them in mags etc! I'm feeling the need to work on something bigger - something I can come to and plough at daily as opposed to the arbitrariness of poems, I just have no idea what that could be.  

I really enjoyed reading alongside my fellow New Writers from the SBT at the Portobello Book Festival, especially enjoyable to read with excellent prose writers like Catherine Simpson who has just signed a book deal for her latest novel Truestory which you can read an extract from here.

Tree Language was reviewed very favourably in Lunar Poetry -

"McCready’s work is characterised by strikingly original language"

"McCready is ready to take risks with some of her word-coinings, too, with a frequent and creative use of hyphenated compounds, a trick which hasn’t been fashionable in British poetry for quite a while. McCready has the good sense to know that it does not matter whether this is ‘the done thing’ if you can make it work: So here we have ‘sun-carved’, ‘frost-flower’, ‘crackle-comb' and even 'fish-O'clock', to name but a few."

"any poet who describes the Firth as ‘punk-black’ has got to be doing
something right"

I'm starting to get used to being referred to as 'McCready'! And I had no idea hyphenated compounds weren't fashionable :) just a writing tic of mine!

My Dunoon poem was featured on the StAnza Blog as part of the Poetry Map of Scotland project and I got a wee mention in The Scotsman review of Be The First To Like This: Anthology of New Scottish Poetry.