So the pre-order page for Madame Ecosse is now up on the Eyewear Publishing website here with very kind and generous blurbs for it from Vicki Feaver, Harry Giles and Jane Clarke, which I'm delighted by and very grateful for!

I've finished full-time work for now which means time in my life for some much needed Poetry - reading and writing. I feel like my subconscious is bursting with poems - just need to find the right expression for it all. I want to do something all encompassing, challenging, bigger, something I can really throw myself into, beyond what I've done before. I've carved out a study corner in the house and finally have my own laptop to be able to work on poems without interruption which is wonderful!! 

However the first priority is going through the proofs for Madame Ecosse - it goes to the printers on January 15th which is very exciting! Thankfully I'm sure I made the right choice in changing the order of poems and by scrapping the sections - it feels much more like a cohesive whole.  

After a dearth of poetry this year I'm very much looking forward to being fully immersed in poetry in 2017!

My short reflective essay on last year's visit to Culloden is in the new Northwords Now and can be read here. It's my first tentative step into non-poetry writing and was a pleasure to write - a descriptive piece closely related to writing poems but communicating something that I couldn't get across in a poem.
I think I'll be writing more pieces like this alongside my poems - in fact I've already begun another
about my visit to the Mary Stuart's chambers in Holyrood Palace last week - an immensely moving place to visit (the chambers specifically, not the palace!). I wish I could have shut out all the other tourists and had the rooms to myself for a while.

So Madame Ecosse is forthcoming February '17 - last week I reordered the entire collection. Originally it was going to be in three sections but the selecting of poems for the first two sections seemed arbitrary with a number of poems, so then I put the collection into two sections - Garden Songs and The Birth Files - but even these sections niggled away at me.
I noticed with Tree Language (which was in three sections) that reviewers would quite happily ignore an entire section in reviewing the book. I guess I wouldn't like The Birth Files poems to be ignored - they are on a tricky subject after all - and I'm suspicious that relegating them to a section at the end of the book would cause them to be easily ignored.
I'm not entirely sure the new order is the finalised deal - I'll need a couple of weeks before I can objectively look at it again.

Like everything else - no readings for ages then they all come at once!
I'll be reading alongside J.O. Morgan, Vicki Husband and Em Strang at -

St Mungo's Mirrorball Showcase 5
Thursday 27th October
CCA Clubroom, Glasgow, 7pm

I'll also be reading at the third Dunoon Book Festival alongside Tariq Latif -

30th October 12.30 pm
Dunoon's Victorian Pier Building

I recently ordered The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough by John B. Vickery - a second-hand ex-uni library book that has clearly never been opened. It looks specifically at the influence of The Golden Bough on Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Lawrence. I can't wait until January when I can really get into my study of The Golden Bough and work out what kind of poem(s) I'm going to feed it all into.

Eyewear Publishing National Poetry Day Event!

Thursday 6th October is National Poetry Day

I'll be reading at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh from my forthcoming collection, Madame Ecosse, alongside Eyewear poets Paul Deaton, Terese Svoboda, and believe it or not, George Elliott Clarke - the Poet Laureate of Canada!!






Here are more details about the reading from the Scottish Poetry Library website -

National Poetry Day event: Eyewear Publishing

Since 2012, Eyewear Publishing has been discovering and publishing interesting new poets from across the UK and overseas. Join us in welcoming four of their freshest voices, including Scotland’s own Marion McCready, one of the country’s fiercest and most original voices; George Elliott Clarke, Canada’s Poet Laureate; Paul Deaton, whose poems have appeared in The Spectator and PN Review; and Terese Svoboda, American poet, novelist, librettist and translator.

Date

6 October 2016 - 6:00pm - 7:30pm

Location

Scottish Poetry Library

Price

£7 (£5)

How to book

Buy a ticket in person at the SPL or via Eventbrite.

Contact for further details

Email or call the SPL on 0131-557-2876.

Working full-time with two kids doesn't leave much room for writing poetry which is why I've not been updating much. However I hope to be cutting down to part-time work in January which will be much better.

I've been glad to have the break away from writing - I wrote so much last year that it drained my inner resources so it's been good to let them build up again.

Today has been a rare day off without kids around and I have notes towards a four or five poem sequence based on Child Ballad 216 - an old Scottish ballad about a pair of lovers who drown in the Clyde. 

Here is folk singer, Kate Rusby, singing a version of the ballad -

A prose piece I wrote about visiting Culloden last year will be published in the next issue of Northwords Now - it's my first non-poetry publication!!

Instead of this October, Madame Ecosse will now be published Spring 2017 - this suits me much better, feels like less of a rush to get it out and will give me plenty of time for editing and proofreading.

I have a few readings lined up - As part of a National Poetry Day event I will be reading at the Scottish Poetry Library October 6th alongside fellow Eyewear Publishing poets Paul Deaton, Terese Svoboda, and Canadian Poet Laureate - George Elliott Clarke!! See here for more details.
I will also be reading at a Mirrorball event in Glasgow CCA on October 27th.

I'm now onto book two of Richard Holmes' brilliant biographies of Coleridge. I feel like I've spent the last few weeks submerged in the recesses of Coleridge's genius and wild brain, I'll be sad when I've finished the book!

I'm delighted that The Manchester Review have published my poem sequence on Dunoon's Victorian pier  - 'She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea' - in their current issue.

Dunoon's Victorian Pier this morning!

The reading list I submitted to POETRY is now up on the blog here - I've finished reading the Ted Hughes biography and obviously I'm now reading the Coleridge books.

A new magazine of Scottish poetry I've been impressed with is the Glasgow-based Raum. I was pleased to have a poem in their recent issue, a beautifully produced magazine with a broad range of poetry, they're definitely worth checking out. 

Life is so full of commitments and busyness at the moment that I'm not finding much in the way of writing time.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited into my son and daughter's primary school to introduce poetry to the children. It turned out to be a rather mad, busy but rewarding experience. I took classes from P1 right through to P7 getting them to write odes and riddles on topics such as the seashore to fruit and vegetables. The school are putting together a book including a poem from every child in the school in order to raise much needed funds for the school. Edwin Morgan's 'The Apple's Song' went down a treat as did Pam Ayers' 'Oh I Wished I Looked After Me Teeth'! I used lots of tips from this great article in Poetry from Rachel Zucker and started every class with writing a class poem.

I've just finished reading Jonathan Bates' biography of Ted Hughes and have moved onto Coleridge: Early Visions by Richard Holmes. According to Bates it's the last book Hughes read / was in the middle of reading when he died. It's beautifully written - really makes Coleridge come to life, cleverly weaving Coleridge's own words throughout it. I'm so enjoying going back to the Romantics. I'm also reading through the Child Ballads, I have an idea of writing my own version of some of them as a bit of a long term project - just need time and peace to get on with it!

I'm pleased that the fabulous Irish poet, Jane Clarke, whose beautifully written first collection, River, did extraordinarily well when it came out last year has written me a very generous blurb for Madame Ecosse. Vicki Feaver has also generously agreed to write one for me. It's such a kindness when poets you respect so highly agree to write a blurb for you!!

I'm excited that I'll be launching Madame Ecosse in October in Glasgow as part of Jim Carruth's Mirrorball reading series and also in Edinburgh at the Scottish Poetry Library at an Eyewear event along with other Eyewear poets.

The 1st of June has never been as sweet as this one!! I can't really believe my Mary Stuart poem is in this month's POETRY magazine (taking up a whole nine pages!!) alongside poetry greats Alice Oswald, D. Nurkse and Sinead Morrissey amongst others, yet here it is - 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/89360

Thanks to Paul Clyne for interviewing me for Poetry Spotlight. You can read the interview and many more interviews with poets on the website here.

I'm so pleased that the Hannah Frank estate have given me permission to use one of Hannah Frank's drawings for the cover of my new collection. Hannah Frank was a Glasgow artist whose Art Nouveau style black and white drawings I've been a fan of since I came across them a few years ago.

I've always particularly loved this drawing which is titled 'Out of the Night a Shadow Passed' and felt it would fit perfectly with the themes in my collection. You can check out more of Hannah Frank's work here.

So here's the prospective cover of Madame Ecosse, which I'm completely delighted with!

Happy that my Polphail Village poem is now up on the Scotia Extremis website which you can find here. It's been paired with a poem about the town of Cumbernauld by Irene Hossack.

I've just received and gone through the proofs for my Mary Stuart poem which will be published in Poetry in the June issue. I'm so excited about it, the proofs look great!

It's a strange feeling having submitted the new collection and now thinking where to begin again. When Tree Language was published I was in the middle of being mentored by Vicki Feaver which forced me to keep writing and was invaluable for helping me to open up my poems.
I have the ever pressing desire to work on something bigger. I so enjoyed writing the longer poems and sequences in Madame Ecosse - of really being able to throw myself into a theme / subject.
At the moment I'm rereading The Golden Bough by James Frazer - doing a close reading of it, plus Roethke's Collected and D.H Lawrence. Also reading The Divided Self by R.D. Laing which is a fascinating study, published in the 1960's, of mental illness through existential philosophy.

Unable to resist the urge to wordle my new collection!

I've been pruning my manuscript and ordering and re-ordering the poems, reading the full collection straight-through aloud to see how the poems sit with each other. I've also been trying to get as many of them into print before the book comes out. Only nine poems in the collection haven't yet been published or been accepted for publication in the next six months - I'm hoping to hear back about some of them soon!

Madame Ecosse

I'm delighted to say that Eyewear Publishing will be bringing out my second full-length poetry collection, Madame Ecosse, this September!!!

I've been working on putting together a second collection manuscript for a while but it wasn't until I wrote what is now the title poem of the collection last week that I felt I was able to bring the poems together as a cohesive whole.

'Madame Ecosse' was a nickname given to Winnie Ewing, mother of the Scottish National Party. She was the second SNP member to sit in the House of Commons and she represented the Highlands and Islands at the European Parliament for 24 years where she gained her nickname for never missing a chance to speak up for Scotland.
I knew immediately that I wanted to write a poem about her and when I did I realised it brought together the main themes of my manuscript.

I'm so completely delighted, I never expected that the book would come out this year and I'm so happy that the excellent Eyewear Publishing are bringing it out. It's such an innovative press and the sheer quality of their books - every Eyewear book or pamphlet I've bought is genuinely a beautiful object in itself.

So now starts the process of ordering, pruning and proofreading the collection - exciting!!


Thanks to Gillian Prew for showcasing my 'Rose Hips and Thistles' poem, first published in Paris Lit Up Magazine, on her blog here.

Also happy to have my 'Magpies', 'Night Poinsettias' and 'Owl Girl' poems published in the new Glasgow Review of Books which you can read here.

Well that's the whole festive shebang out of the way and I've been absorbed in reading so many books - I find myself always going back to certain poets - Roethke, Transtromer, Lawrence, H.D., Bhatt.  More recently Linda Gregg's Collected which I picked up a couple of months ago, and Niedecker Collected which I've sat aside for now. I've been reading a variety of folklore and mythology books too, the latest is Healing Threads: Traditional Medicines of the Highlands and Islands by Mary Beith.


Tree Language is on Christmas sale for a mere £3.99!!

As part of a Scottish poet's project I'm working on a poem about Polphail - a ghost village on the banks of Loch Fyne about an hour-and-a half-drive from Dunoon. The housing estate was built to house oil rig construction workers in the 1970's during the Scottish oil boom but for practical reasons no workers were ever housed at Polphail. Despite the site being fully functional and furnished with kitchens, laundrette, bar and leisure facilities it was left to vandals and natural decay. A few years back an artist group gained permission to brighten up the place with graffiti-style art work which the occasional visitor has added to. It's a fascinating place to visit and I have plenty notes for the poem - not sure yet which direction to take it but many possibilities.