One short poem, not really reading or writing much at the moment but find myself drawn back to Lorca's Blood Wedding, such an amazing read and so beautifully written!

Crossing the Clyde

(post removed)

A whole week lost to the flu nightmare and now it's a mad catch-up till Christmas. So no poetry read or written, just wishing you all a Very Merry Christmas and giving you a song instead of a poem -

written by Rich Mullins, sung by Amy Grant:

'Sometimes my life just don't make sense at all
And the mountains look so big, and my faith just seems so small
So hold me, Jesus, I'm shakin' like a leaf
You have been king of my glory, won't you be my prince of peace?

And I wake up in the night, and feel the dark
It's so hot inside my soul, there must be blisters on my heart
So hold me, Jesus, I'm shakin' like a leaf
You have been king of my glory, won't you be my prince of peace?

Surrender don't come natural to me
I'd rather fight you for somethin' I don't really want than take what you've
given me
And I've beat my head against so many walls, I'm fallin' down, I'm fallin' on
my knees

And the Salvation Army band is playing this hymn
And your grace rings out so deep, it makes my resistence seem so thin
Oh, hold me, Jesus, I'm shakin' like a leaf
You have been king of my glory, won't you be my prince of peace?

Oh, hold me, Jesus, I'm shakin' like a leaf
You have been king of my glory, won't you be my prince of peace?'

The St. Andrews based yearly poetry festival will soon be upon us!

The programme for StAnza 2011 is now online. I'm really excited about going especially since I missed it this year. My plan is to head up on the Friday and stay until the Sunday.

After a quick look at the events, the one's I'll be hoping to get tickets for will be the intimate reading with John Burnside, the Marilyn Hacker / Paul Farley reading, a workshop with Claire Crowther on The Fatrasie (whatever that is, but a workshop with Claire Crowther on anything poetry-wise will be fantastic!), lunch and poetry with Hugh McMillan (Shug!) event, the Selima Hill and Philip Gross reading, and the Ciaran Carson Masterclass. Does this not sound like a fantastic weekend?!

I'm in literary heaven reading these two books at the moment. The Lorca plays are simply amazing, gorgeous language and imagery with a gripping storyline. Blood Wedding epecially, my copy here is translated by Langston Hughes. I'll definitely read it in different translations to compare but I think Hughes has done a great job with this, I really love it.
Ariel, The Restored Edition, far exceeded my expectations. Not only to have the right poems in the order Plath intended but also to be able to read a fascimile of the typed manuscript of the poems as she left them is breath-takingly different to reading the softly-softly Ted Hughes version of Ariel. I'll be reading the collection through several times to really take in this new experience of her poems.

First draft -


Cutting Loose

(post removed)

The Scotsman Haiku hogmany poetry competition - for those of you not on facebook in case you didn't see this. Entries to be in before the 10th of December so get haikuing!! Link to the competition article here.

Another pic, just because it's his birthday today. My now four year old son who insists he is a crocodile, has been dinosaur-mad for the last two years, whose favourite food is nan bread with humous, and bread and butter with slices of pepperoni and who sleeps with Stripes the zebra every night!

I can't remember the last time we saw snow here in November but as I type it's a veritable blizzard outside!

The new issue of Northwords Now is available to read online (as are the previous issues) and I'm so pleased to have some poems in it along with Colin Will, Elisabeth Rimmer, Jim Carruth and Norman MacCaig no less!! I haven't had a chance yet to read through it properly but it looks like a really great issue with an interesting selection of poems, prose, essays and reviews.

Pictures, for a change!

For once, I grapped the camera while heading out for a walk yesterday. Rubbish day for taking pictures - dull mid-afternoon with a bitterly cold breeze!

But I wanted to show you my beloved Firth of Clyde which features in so many of my poems and which I love looking at regardless of the weather. These two pictures are looking down the Clyde; the islands of Cumbrae and Bute are faint lines on the horizon.

This is our Victorian pier, the photo is looking up the Firth where the water slips to the left to become the Holy Loch and slips around to the right, curving past Greenock and making its way all the way up to Glasgow.
 
 

.
This picture looks directly across the Firth to Inverkip, and these are the Gantocks, the infamous rocks that have been the cause of many a shipwreck and which you can hear the seals howl from at night. I wrote a poem about the Gantocks which can be read here.

and here are my travelling companions, Ruby all wrapped up in her pram and Sorley begging for a shot of the camera, but I didn't fancy fishing it out of the water!

Currently reading The Silver Bough and loving it!

Most of you will have heard of James George Frazer's hugely influential book The Golden Bough, acknowledged by Yeats, Eliot, WCW, Pound, Lawrence and many others as deeply important to their work.

Well The Silver Bough is also written by a Scot. First published in 1956 and authored by F. Marian (no less!) McNeill, it explores Scottish folklore and folk belief and is packed with treasures, local stories, etymology of place-names, history, history of religion and religious and Druidic practices. Also full of gorgeous words like 'skeely' and 'gowpens' as in from this short extract:

"In Orkney, sea-water was used in a rite to bring butter. The skeely woman, or charmer, went to the shore with a pail and waited until nine waves had rolled in. At the reflux of the last, she took three gowpens of water (a gowpen is as much as can be held in cupped hands) and carried them home in her pail. The water was put into the churn with the milk and ensured a good supply of butter."

I love all the folklore from Lewis, the stories are link to my ancestors. I remember when I was a child there used to be a 'fairy well' on the beach near my grandparents house in Lewis. I used to search it out on my holidays, a little circle of stones on a huge Atlantic beach where fresh water bubbled up from under the ground.

Books, books, books...

I'm a slow poetry book reader, it takes me months and longer to digest a collection, re-reading it, thinking on the poems, letting them work on me consciously and unconsciously.
As well as many other books, I've been thinking on Robin Robertson's collection The Wrecking Light and Phillis Levin's May Day over the last while. I've also been reading Songs the Lightning Sang, a pamphlet by Geoff Cooper. Pages of online poetry that I have on my favourites bar at the moment are Plath (saves digging the book out all the time!), D H Lawrence, and Baudelaire.

Next month is birthday month and these are the books on my hit list: -
Identity Parade the controversial new anthology from Bloodaxe of new British and Irish poets
Plath's Ariel - the one with the poems in the order Plath intended, I've been meaning to get it for ages.
A Les Murray collection, there are so many that I haven't decided which one to go for.
The Wild Iris by American poet Louise Gluck
Blood Wedding and Yerma, two plays by Lorca
Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon
The Return by Eleanor Cooke
The gorgeous looking Venti, a poetry pamphlet by JoAnne MacKay
The also gorgeous looking collection The Lost Garden by Hugh MacMillan
And some more pamphlet poetry which I haven't picked out yet.
That's all, I think...

First draft -

The Giving Trees

(post removed)

First draft -


You come to me, Burnie MacKinnon,

(post removed)

First draft -


Stones

(removed)

I've been reading over the last while Jim Murdoch's poetry collection This is Not About What You Think. It's refreshingly different to my normal poetry reading and written in a style entirely different to my own. I've been following Jim's blog for a couple of years now. He writes lengthy, essay-style informative and thought-provoking posts about authors, poets, books and writing. Many of his poems can be found scattered amongst his posts, mostly there to illustrate a point in his discourse.

Jim's poems are, by and large, rather short and aphoristic in style, there are several poems devoted to giving advice to children for example. Many of the poems come across almost like a series of proverbs in verse. The poems move between providing the reader with glimpses into the narrator's life and relationships on the one hand and poems providing us with universal 'truths' gained from the narrator's experience on the other.

One of my favourite poems in the book is 'Failing'. In many ways such a simple poem and yet the pathos really strikes home.

Failing

My mother taught me
how to be old.
I watched her falter
then fail and fall.

At least she tried to
teach me but what
did I care to know
about such things?

Now I'm old myself
I wish I'd paid
attention; I'm not
sure I ache right.

I am sure she'd have
something to say
about my limp, how
I hold my hip

and her “stupid cough”
I can't get right.
I must be such a
disappointment.

Another one of my favourites from the book -

Marks

My dad used to give me marks out of ten:
homework – seven out of ten,
the dishes – eight out of ten.

Anything less than a five
came with a clip on the ear.

Marks is merely another word for scars.
I have those too, the ones you
can see and the ones you can't.

I'd give my childhood a three.
That's me being generous.

Dad's no longer here and so I have to
mark myself. Is that what you
were waiting to hear, doctor?

What do you think this poem
might be worth? Maybe an eight?

In these two poems, as with most of Jim's poems, just as much of the poems exists between the lines as in the lines on the page. There is subtle insinuation at work, hints, question-begging. The poems can be funny too -

Tools

"Just because you have a hammer
it doesn't make you a joiner."
My father had his way with words.

So I took a handful of nails
and boarded up my heart
against him and against the world.

And safe on the inside I yelled:
"Screw you!"
but he was never one for puns.

You could say of many of the poems  that they verge on psychoanalysis, philosophical questioning and a hint of the absurdity of life when examined. These can be seen in statements such as "The first lies we tell / are generally to ourselves". "I never understood / what they meant by "in" / as if love could somehow / change into a place / to crawl inside and hide".

It is also evident in this poem -

Advice to Children III

It's supposed to feel good
when you do the right thing.
And sometimes you do.

But mostly you feel
like you had no real choice,
that somehow they made you.

And that can't be right.

The power of understatment is a quality that runs right through this collection and at its best carries the full weight of emotion with great impact.

Overall an enjoyable read, and it bears re-reading well. I'm very glad to have this collection to mull over and go back to.

First Draft

Fuchsia Pact

(post removed)

A blog I gladly stumbled across recently is Poems Found in Translation. It's a wonderful blog, not only does the blog author/linguist translate poems from literally dozens of languages including Persian, Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese, for most of the translations he uploads a recording of himself reading the poem in its original language. I love this! I love reading poetry outwith the anglo/american traditions but I always feel I'm missing out by reading translations and not being able to hear the poem's original cadence, rhyme scheme, rhythm etc. I'm also really enjoying the translations themselves, they are translated as poems rather than literal word for word texts.

I've had some poems accepted by Northwords Now for publication in their next issue, which I'm really happy about! The editor of the mag was at the Callander poetry weekend and he emailed me after my reading to say he really enjoyed it, which pleased me no end! Plus they pay!!!!

(second draft)

I’m searching for signs, heart sounds

(post removed)

The releasing of the previously unpublished poem 'Last Letter' by Ted Hughes has caused a fair bit of interest in the news over the last week. Anything that can shed light on those final days before Plath's death is of great interest to Plath fans though it may seem a little voyeuristic to some. Anyhow I thought I'd give some of my thoughts on the poem as a biographical document rather than as a poem.

The main surprise is that on the Friday before her death, Plath had posted a letter of goodbye to Hughes which he had received earlier than she'd expected -

"Your note reached me too soon—-that same day,
Friday afternoon, posted in the morning"

..."That was one more straw of ill-luck
Drawn against you by the Post-Office"

So she posted the letter in the morning possibly assuming he would receive it the following day. Instead he got it that afternoon and rushed around to her flat fearing the worst. She was getting ready to spend the weekend with friends. The insinuation is that her plan was to let him stew in panic over the weekend not knowing  whether she was dead or alive and if alive no idea where she was -

..."Had I bungled your plan?
Had it surprised me sooner than you purposed?
Had I rushed it back to you too promptly?
One hour later—-you would have been gone
Where I could not have traced you."

"How I would have got through that weekend.
I cannot imagine. Had you plotted it all?"

Yet Hughes arrives at her flat, Plath burns the letter and Hughes is seemingly reassured enough after seeing her to leave her alone with their children and go off for the weekend with no further contact with her.

"My last sight of you alive.
Burning your letter to me, in the ashtray,
With that strange smile."

..."But what did you say
Over the smoking shards of that letter
So carefully annihilated, so calmly,
That let me release you, and leave you"

The poem tells us that he spent the Sunday night with Susan, who turns out to be Susan Alliston, a poet who died in 1969 of Hodgkin's disease. Hughes wrote the introduction to her book of poems. Another surprise - Assia wasn't the only other woman he was having an affair with. The strangest part is that they spent the night in the same room / flat on Rugby street where Hughes and Plath had spent their wedding night, the very bed even -

"Susan and I spent that night
In our wedding bed. I had not seen it
Since we lay there on our wedding day."

There is also the suggestion that Plath phoned Hughes several times during that last Sunday night and early dawn on Monday. Hughes being the only one privy to her last diary entries, she may have recorded such fruitless attempts to get in touch with him -

..."How often
Did the phone ring there in my empty room,
You hearing the ring in your receiver"

"Towards the phone booth that can never be reached.
Before midnight. After midnight. Again.
Again. Again. And, near dawn, again."

The poem is another bizarre addition to the mystery of events. Clearly, to my mind, Hughes wanted this poem published posthumously otherwise he would have destroyed it instead he entrusted a typed copy of it to his wife, Carol.

I've got to say, I like our present poet laureate but her response to the poem as "a bit like looking into the sun as it's dying" is surely the most hyperbolic twee I've ever read!

First draft -

Autumn trees

(post removed)