It's been a while since I've made a word-cloud so I fed my poems from this year and last year into a word cloud-maker and it seems that the moon is presiding over my current poems!
Taking stock of my recent poems - I've written thirty-five poems over the last eighteen months, twelve of which are for the scrapheap which leaves twenty-three poems towards my eventual next collection.
I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a 'Scottish' writer. Much of my poetry is strongly connected to place so I guess I've always felt like a particularly Scottish writer in that sense. But I've been thinking a lot more recently about Scottish history and how history has formed us. Working as a tour guide in a castle means that I spend a lot of time talking about the Highland clans, clan wars and the eventual crushing of the clan system. Some of this has been ebbing into my writing as I ponder what all this history means to me personally in the here and now. I finished a poem this week about the muskets on display at Inveraray castle which were last used at the battle of Culloden - I never thought I'd write a poem about guns!
