Now that the final manuscript of The Birth Garden is emailed off I'm starting to get excited about the new book!

In December I received an email from Colin Waters whom I had met through his work at the Scottish Poetry Library and subsequently through the beautifully produced anthology of Scottish poetry he edited - Be The First To Like This. He had mentioned previously that in his new role as poetry editor for Glasgow publisher Vagabond Voices he was planning to put together a series of three-poet anthology collections and asked me if I happened to have a themed selection of poems and would be willing to be the third poet in the first produced anthology.
I was delighted to be asked and had just written a series of birth poems - a theme which kept creeping into my garden poems over the last year and when I put all the like-minded poems together I knew I had a mini-collection to contribute.

The anthology is going to be called Our Real, Red Selves which is taken from a line in my Poem for a Garden. My birth garden collection will be flanked by two collections of war poems - I won't mention the poets until it's been made public!  

Other good news - Colin has managed to get us a reading slot at Glasgow's Aye Write Book Festival in April - to publicise both the Be The First To Like This Anthology and the upcoming Our Real, Red Selves which will probably be published around the end of May.

Because I didn't expect to book-publish the poems so soon I've not got managed to magazine-publish many of them - it's been especially painful to withdraw accepted poems because the book comes out before the mag would publish them!

So here's a Wordle of The Birth Garden instead!