My contributor copy of Scotia Extremis arrived this week. Beautifully put together by Andy Jackson and Brian Johnstone, it is a great selection of poems. A wide-ranging anthology exploring the many aspects, extremes and icons of contemporary Scotland.


The collection is being show-cased at Glasgow's Aye Write Festival. I will be reading my poem, alongside readings from many other poets who contributed to the collection, on Sunday 24th March, 3pm at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.



I've had a good writing week - been working on a three-part sequence on Glasgow Central Station, another Glasgow poem and a playful primrose poem. It's been cathartic getting back to writing after three months of no poems!

Poems, Podcast and Video...

I can't believe it's this Saturday myself, JL Williams and Harry Giles will be reading in the beautiful Mitchell Library as part of the Aye Write festival. We'll be reading from Our Real Red Selves anthology from Vagabond Voices on  Sat 18th 6-7 pm. Do book a ticket from the Aye Write website if you fancy it!

There are video interviews of JL Williams and Harry Giles on the Vagabond Voices website. There's one of me too - a short, wind-blown interview of me reading poems from the anthology in the Castle Gardens, Dunoon!

Also the interview-podcast I did last year with the Scottish Poetry Library is now available to listen to here.

And I have three poems from Our Real Red Selves featured on Josephine Corcoran's wonderful poetry blog here!

Easily the most entertaining poet's letters I've read so far. I thoroughly recommend the selected letters of W.S. Graham.

Probably shouldn't be a surprise that the letters are so good since Graham wrote excellent letter poems! The letters are in a sense poem drafts - he says in one that he writes the letters as much for himself as for the recipients. Wonderful early and a few late letters to Edwin Morgan discussing his writing, wonderful exuberant letters to Elizabeth Smart, Michael Schmidt gets a telling-off letter for a review he wrote about him, letters about writing, begging for money, his poverty-struggles, all packed with personality and most of all humour. Letters I'll go back to.


I'm excited to have just finished a seven-poem sequence on Mary Queen of Scots! I was keen to write about her after I came across and read some of her letters on-line. What surprised me was how human she seemed as opposed to the distant stock character queen from history. I read the well-written and in-depth biography of her by Antonia Fraser. There are many surviving letters written by Mary and many recorded first-hand accounts that it is possible to build up a reasonably accurate picture of her as a person. Plus there are so many mythological aspects to her story which is a gift to write about.

Glasgow's Aye Write Book Festival programme in now available on-line here. I'll be reading on Saturday 18th April 6-7pm with J.L. Williams and Harry Giles.

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!