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.

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.

*New readings coming up in Dunoon and Glasgow* - 

I'll be reading and discussing books with Vagabond Voices writers Chris Dolan, Gerry Loose and Allan Cameron at Bookpoint, Dunoon on Wednesday 20th May at 6 pm. I'll be reading from Our Real Red Selves and copies of Tree Language will be available also.

The actual launch of Our Real Red Selves will be in the CCA in Glasgow on June 4th at 7 pm which I'll be reading at alongside JL Williams and Harry Giles.

I've not been writing much lately - stuck in a bit of a rut after my Mary poems and endless family illnesses. However I have been reading lots - the mammoth Collected Ted Hughes which has been a wonderful and, well, huge read! A complete mythological  world to get lost and roam about in! Also been reading Jim Murdoch's new book of poems, Reader Please Supply Meaning, always a pleasure to read Jim's questioning and thought-provoking poems. Picked up a copy at Aye Write of Glasgow Makar Jim Carruth's verse novella, Killochries, which is beautifully written. And lastly couldn't resist getting Sujata Bhatt's latest collection, Poppies in Translation.

Very excited to be going through to Edinburgh next week to hear Pascale Petit read from Fauverie! What a privilege it was to hear Pascale read some of her Fauverie poems to a small group of us a few years ago now at Chateau Ventenac in the South of France. It seems quite a lifetime ago! I'm delighted that she's reading in Edinburgh with Scottish poet Niall Campbell and that I'll get a chance to hear her again. The event is run by The Scottish Poetry Library and will be on 21st May, 6.30pm at The Saltire Society, 9 Fountain Close, High Street, Edinburgh.

Thankful for an honest and thoughtful blog review of Tree Language here.

I'm excited to say that a series of my new poems will be published later this year in a collection featuring two other poets also. I'll write more details when it's all been finalised.
My section is going to be called The Birth Garden and will be prefaced with this quote from Euripides' Medea -
"I would rather stand three times in a battle line than give birth to one child".

As the title suggests, the poems are very much intermingled birth and garden poems. I was really excited at how well the birth and garden poems worked together when I was putting together the selection for the book. I thought I would move away from the bloodiness of Tree Language but I'm afraid these poems are rather bloody too!
I was really taken with the concept of Twilight Sleep - an induced amnesia so that the body remembers the pain of childbirth but the mind doesn't - and also how birthing women were ill-treated during the process.

Not quite sure what to move onto next with my poems. I've recently got very much into D. H. Lawrence's poems - I have no idea why they are not so widely applauded, some of them seem incredible to me. I wrote an odd tulip poem very much under Lawrence's influence and I liked the different tone to it so maybe that's an area I can push further.

Have dozens of submissions out - hope some of them take. My longish three part Lot's Wife poem will be in the New York based online journal Transmissions in March.  

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.

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. 

Hello blogger, my old friend. I've come to talk with you again...

It's been rather busy since I've updated. The most miraculous news is that after all these years of writing alone on my little peninsula I've finally come across some other local poets and we have formed a monthly poetry work-shopping group. Wonderful to get a chance to meet up and talk poetry with real live people - there are four of us and bizarrely we all live within two streets of each other!

Dunoon hosted it's first Mini Book Festival which I read at with Tariq Latif - it was a good opportunity to try out some of the new poems. Hoping it'll be the first of an annual local book festival which would be wonderful. Tariq and I also did a poetry reading in the summer in the local bookshop which seemed to go down well - it's so good having someone else locally to read with!

I put together a book list for the Scottish Book Trust of some of my favourite contemporary female poets which you can read here.

I was pleasantly surprised to come across a lovely five star review of Tree Language on Amazon. It feels wonderfully good to get the feedback and simply that my book has found a happy home in some complete stranger's life!

Very pleased to have some poems in Be The First To Like This, an anthology of new Scottish poetry with a foreword written by Liz Lochhead. Colin Waters from the Scottish poetry library (editor of the anthology) has put together a great webpage for it here. It's being launched next week in Glasgow and Edinburgh and tomorrow we're all getting our picture taken at the Scottish Poetry Library for the Saturday Herald and Sunday Herald Magazine, so that's quite exciting!

Next month I'll be reading and chatting at the Portobello Book Festival in Edinburgh as part of a Scottish Book Trust event along with two other recipients of the SBT New Writer's Award. Check out the dates of the book festival here and if you're around please come along - I've heard there will be wine!

Finally, good old Highland Mary's voting yes and so am I. Only four more days until the referendum and it's all up for grabs!!

random photo - eagle carving at Arrochar!

I've been reading Theodore Roethke over the summer and though I'd read some of his poems before it's only now that they've really gripped me. The use of imagery from the natural world to intensely explore the psychological inner world, the adoption of folk beat and childish rhymes and language in order to break through to the deeper recesses of the mind I've found to be utterly fascinating and in line with what I'd been trying to work towards without really knowing that's what I've been trying to do!

It's the last week of the summer holidays and it has been a full-on summer of trying to keep the kids busy and entertained which has meant little time for writing though I've been working on a few poems and managed to read quite a bit. This year Ruby goes to school and everything changes for me - for the first time in seven-and-a-half years (since my eldest was born)  I'll no longer spend the majority of the day with a young child at my heels. A bittersweet feeling, didn't realise how much my subconscious was dwelling on it until it came out unexpectantly in a recent poem.
Much has changed in the last seven years, back then I thought when the kids went to school I would go back to studying and do a phd in political philosophy, but now all I really want to do is read and write poems! I will have to get a job though and had in the past had been involved in one-to-one tutoring in adult literacy which I really enjoyed and I'm looking to get back into again - I've spoken to the local community adult learning centre about doing some sort of creative writing class and they're very keen on the idea. But initially I guess I'm going to have a lot more time on my hands!

I was delighted with this brilliant review of Tree Language from Kirsten Irving which you can read on the Sidekick Books website here.

I went through to Edinburgh last week to record a podcast at the Scottish Poetry Library with Colin Waters, really enjoyed it - very much like a conversation rather than an intense interview, and Colin asked some really interesting / thoughtful / challenging questions - I only hope I didn't waffle too much in my responses! Wonderful to be in a library of entirely poetry-related books, so difficult choosing just six to borrow! Plus they have a good number of poetry mags and journals and I'm such a fan of Sujata Bhatt now that despite reading and re-reading her decent-sized volume of collected poems over the last four months I was so delighted to come across four new poems by her in the latest PN Review!

So the books I got out the library are -

• Theodore Roethke: The Journey from I to Otherwise - Neil Bowers
• The Terrible Threshold - Stanley Kunitz
• Translations from the Natural World - Les Murray
• Collected Poems - Lynette Roberts
• Selected Poems - Laura Riding
• Abyssophone - Peter Redgrove

So pleased to have a poem from Tree Language and a lovely wee write up in last Saturday's The Scotsman newspaper. Colin Waters from the Scottish Poetry Library contacted me last month to say that he wanted to pick a poem from the collection for the newspaper and that he wanted to arrange for me to do a podcast at the Scottish Poetry Library which I plan to go through to Edinburgh next month to do.

Colin has also taken three of my poems for an anthology of new Scottish writing he's putting together and which Liz Lochhead is writing the foreword for. I'm really pleased about it as an American professor at StAnza was bemoaning to me the lack of anthologies of new Scottish writing!

The lovely Australian poet Julie Maclean has featured a couple of poems from Tree Language on her blog here. I met Julie on Pascale Petit's wondeful poetry course in France last year and so enjoyed her poems. 

The very nice people at Transmission Magazine asked me to record a reading of one of my poems for their website which you can listen to here.

I have, I think, a solid seventeen poems towards a new collection so far. Quite different poems to the ones in Tree Language - much more expanded with the help of Vicki Feaver and Sujata Bhatt's Collected poems which have made these new poems possible. 

Delighted to receive the summer bulletin from the Poetry Book Society with a nice wee review of Tree Language.

A long poem of mine about Jerusalem is in the current issue of Envoi and I have three poems in a New York based online multi-media journal called Transmission (which you can find here) alongside poets Amy King and Elizabeth Spires. 

I have a good fifteen poems towards a new collection, quite different from the ones in Tree Language. Trying to stay disciplined about reading and writing and on the look out for some new reading inspiration. I've finally got around to ordering Selima Hill's Selected collection - Gloria -  which I can't wait to arrive as well as W.S Merwin's new collection, The Moon Before Morning. 

Wine and books at the Eyewear Spring Launch!!

Wednesday, 21st May at 7pm

I'll be reading alongside Penny Boxall, Mandy Khan, Rufo Quintavalle, SJ Fowler and this year's Melita HUme Prize winner - Amy Blakemore who will be introduced by Emily Berry. If anyone is in the London area it will be a great night in the fantastic London Review Bookshop!

Reaching the dizzy heights of euphoria here!!!! My books have arrived for this Friday's Glasgow launch of Tree Language. Just can't describe how elated I am, may sleep with a copy under my pillow tonight :) Todd and the team at Eyewear really know how to produce simply gorgeous books, it really is Beautiful - designed by the excellently talented Dutch designer Edwin Smet. What an utter pleasure to see all my poems in these pages - feels like they've finally been brought together like a little family reunion!! 

Marion McCready and Friends, Tell it Slant, 16 May, 2014

Eyewear Publishing

launches Marion McCready’s Melita Hume winning debut Tree Language

Tell It Slant, 134 Renfrew Street, G3 6ST

Friday 16 May 7 p.m.

Just before her launch in London. Marion McCready will be joined by several guest readers.

Other readers: Samuel Tongue, Katherine Sowerby and Ross Wilson.

It's coming up to the end of my nine months of being mentored by Vicki Feaver which was part of the very generous package put together by the Scottish Book Trust. It's been a wonderfully encouraging, stretching experience.

When asked by the SBT who would be my dream mentor (within travelable distance), I mentioned Vicki Feaver without genuinely expecting to be paired with her and was utterly surprised and delighted when I found out that she had agreed to do it. Every couple of months since last July I've been making my way through to Edinburgh to Vicki's flat and spent the afternoon with her poring over the poems I had written for our meeting as well as some poems by contemporary poets that we had brought to share.

Apart from the week I spent on Pascal Petit's course this was the first time I really had any experience of face-to-face thorough input from someone on my work so it was initially incredibly nerve-wracking. What I wanted from the mentoring was help to extend, open up my poems and develop the voice in my poems. It's been so good to have someone there to check with what exactly is and isn't working in my poems and it's given me the confidence to expand my writing knowing I'll get the all-important feedback on it.

Vicki herself is incredibly intelligent and astute as well as being a very generous and good-humoured mentor - I really don't think I could have had better. The pressure to keep writing in order to produce poems for our meetings has helped to make me much more of a disciplined reader and writer. Regular blogging is one of the things I've had to let by the wayside in order to keep my creative energies focused on writing. The challenge after our last meeting will be on keeping up the momentum and self-discipline.

The exciting news is.... my book has come back from the printers and now I'm just waiting for my author copies to be posted up to me.
Now that Paris is out of the way I'll be planning the Glasgow launch which will be held in Tell it Slant - Glasgow's new poetry bookshop on Renfrew Street, 7pm on Friday 15th May. Also reading at the launch will be Ross Wilson, Katherine Sowerby and Samuel Tongue - very much looking forward to it!

I have a poem from Tree Language up on Colin Will's Open Mouse here.

Had a really good night at the Scottish Book Trust showcase event in Edinburgh. It was great to get a chance to hear the other readers especially the fiction writers who all read so grippingly well that I can't wait for all of their stories, books to come out. I also got to meet and chat with some of this year's New Writers Awardees which was really nice. The Scottish Book Trust produced a great little book with a selection of writing from all of us plus a page of info we wrote ourselves about our writing. You can download the online version of the book for free here.

Here's what I wrote about  about Tree Language - 

The poems in my first full-length collection, which I’ve been working on over this last year, fall into four distinct sections which I only became aware of when putting the collection together; though the same, generally dark, themes are carried through each section.

My main interest in writing these poems was to explore themes of love, death, sometimes violence and how they are played out, reflected in and contrasted against the backdrop of nature and the landscape the poems are set in. I also have a tendency towards the surreal.

Many of my poems begin from observations in the natural world: the shape of a tree and its shadow, the sun on the back of the Clyde, the flowering orchid on my windowsill. I find that through examining the physical details of nature I’m able to gain a level of distance and objectivity which allows me to explore broader human and personal themes.

The focus on nature also enables me to sidestep the confines of narrative logic, tap into the unconscious dream – like processes but at the same time stay rooted in the physical, tangible world.     

 The next event is StAnza. I'm reading on the Saturday as part of the Scottish Booktrust Showcase. There are four of us reading so we get fifteen minutes each. I'm only able to get to St Andrews by the Friday night so I'm gutted to be missing Sujata Bhatt and Brian Turner reading. However I have booked tickets and will finally get the chance to hear John Burnside which I'm incredibly excited about and also the masterclass with Paul Muldoon. 

My next mentoring meeting with Vicki Feaver is the week after Stanza, I have four poems ready for it so far which I'm pleased about. Really working hard to expand my writing and I feel hopeful that these poems are doing just that.

Can hardly believe it....

And this lovely write-up from Jon Stone, the competition judge -

“I chose Marion McCready’s Tree Language as the overall winner for two major reasons: firstly, the poetry is incredibly dark and rich and bloody (blood is a particular theme), with frequently brilliant lines and almost Celan-esque word pairings: ‘blood-cut son’, ‘snow-eyes dressing’, ‘death fruits’. Or how about a poem that opens, running on from its title:
Like a dead shrew
the baby lies comically still.
Secondly, as a collection, it’s superbly structured. Repetition within and between the poems is used to haunting effect; often, a motif or image returns in the manner of a memory resurfacing, or a recurring dream. The loosely held themes allow her to cover a range of territory, including war poems, over four distinct chapters, without seeming to stray from the direct path established in the opening pieces. This is assured, disconcertingly potent work with a sharp and distinctive flavour.”
Todd Swift, Publisher of Eyewear said “We are thrilled to be publishing Marion in 2014.  Tree Language is an extraordinary collection from a debut poet of rare ability and vision. This collection is a real find and I am ecstatic that through the Melita Hume Prize we are able to celebrate such a strong talent. ”
Tree Language will be publishing by Eyewear in Spring 2014.