burnedthumb at Lúcháir

A Poem Spreads its Wings

2012-01-30T21:04:00.001Z

You know Alastair Cook who did the beautiful cover of Wherever We Live Now? He has made a filmpoem out of the first piece in the book Visiting the Dunbrody Famine Ship and you can see it

here

I hope you like it as much as I do. If you do you can hear Alastair talk about the filmpoem project

here

For those who haven't heard me do it, the Dunbrody is a ship which was used to carry emigrants from Ireland to America after the famine. It has since been restored, and you can see it in the harbour at New Ross, in County Wexford. It's a harrowing experience. If you were a cabin passenger, the accommodation was tiny, but you were allowed up on deck, if the weather was calm. If you were steerage, however, you weren't allowed up except at your designated cooking times, and you were allocated a bunk to a family. There wouldn't have been room for my Foleys to lie down anywhere for the whole five weeks - and we're a tiny family by and large.

There's also a database which claims to record all the emigrantsbetween 1848 and about 1930. It's very comprehensive, but I can't find my Foleys on it. We have always believed that their ship was wrecked, but statistically they probably died of TB or hunger or anything else they might have caught in the hell-hole of steerage.

The Irish are used to diaspora people coming back looking for their roots. It's a bit more than nostalgia. I found I couldn't settle in Sctland until I had some idea where I'd come from, and now I'm quite at home. I thought that this was just one way, but it occurred to me when I was at New Ross and Waterford, that the Irish are also bereft. While I'm asking "where do I come from? Where do I belong?" they are asking "Where did you go? what happened to you?" The chain that connects us has seekers at both ends.

Song Thrush on Ash Tree

2012-01-26T10:48:00.003Z

Fifty years ago when my friends Mary and Charles moved into the village, there were bitterns in the reeds below the bridge, and the river was well-known for the wintering ducks that could be seen here. Even when we moved here, twenty years later, you could see flocks of lapwings over the fields in spring-time, and fieldfares and redwings every time you looked out.

The changes haven't been all bad. We see more goldfinches and yellowhammers than we used to, and buzzards and kestrels are common. There's even a sparrowhawk, I don't think the owls have left yet, and there are swallows and housemartins on both sides of the river. But the redwings and fieldfares are an occasional sighting now, curlews are very rare, and the duck populations on the river have dwindled enormously. There are still lapwings and skylarks, but you have to look much more carefully for them, and I haven't seen a hare for more than five years.

The bird that Mary loved most of all was the song thrush. She used to sit out in the garden listening to thrushes singing in the evenings, and she missed it very much when she became too deaf to hear it. But she wouldn't have heard thrush-song very often anyway. I have always thought that if you have a lot of blackbirds you won't have many thrushes because they are in direct competition with each other, and we certainly have a lot of blackbirds. They must be winter migrants, but there are at least eight of them in and around our garden now, bullying the sparrows off the feeders and squabbling amongst themeslves, and even in the nesting season there must be at least two pairs here. I'd pretty much given up hope of hearing a song thrush in full territorial voice.

Until this morning. As I came across the bridge from the supermarket I could hear it from at least fifty yards away, singing and singing in that umistakeable fine careless rapture kind of a way, perched at the top of a sapling ash (not the one in the picture unfortunately, that one's further up the river), staking his claim to the garden, the riverbank, the park and the whole village. Mary would have been so pleased.

Advance and Retire

2012-01-20T10:40:00.001Z

There's a figure in Scottish Country dancing (English and Irish too, for that matter) called advance and retire. You start a great many dances by dancing forward four steps and back four steps. So this year has gone. It's not just the weather, frost one morning

and seed sowing and birds marking out nesting territories the next

but the poetry too.

Just as new and exciting ideas put out little tendrils, like the witch hazel flowers, something comes along that knocks it all back again. But this week saw the start of something that I hope will really last. The online magazine of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, Stravaig has come out. It has two of my poems in it, but more excitingly, it has (among a lot of very fine stuff), poems from Susan Richardson, essays from Gordon Peters and Mohammed Hashas, poems and images from Nat Hall, and a film Abachen from Alastair Cook. This is greatly to the credit of the editor, Norman Bissell, whose hard work over many years brought together the inspiring mix of talents and opportunities that made it all possible. I hope you like it!

these precious and beautiful things

2012-01-20T09:08:00.002Z

I like this post a lot. Daniela says she doesn't 'do faith', whereas anyone who has been around this blog for a while knows that I do. I try to keep theological content off the page, because unless you're interested enough to follow the whole complicated thing, it's just annoying.

But this is how faith works in my head. I'm really pleased to have discovered this blog.

All things being equal there will be a new post later today and I'll update the links and the website, so there will be a permanent link to These Precious and Beautiful Things in the sidebar.

First Steps in January

2012-01-11T11:22:00.000Z

The first snowdrops are out!

Although it feels quite chilly and there is frost forecast for later in the week, I was much encouraged by what's going on in the garden. There were three blackbirds bathing in the pond this morning, sparrows and bluetits and great tits all busy at the feeders, and warming up their territory-marking songs, and signs of life everywhere. The first buds on the hazel hedge are beginning to break - always the first in this garden -

bulbs are beginning to show, and the very first flowers are already out!

On the poetry front, too there are new beginnings. I was at the first evnt at the SCottish Writers Centre in Glasgow last week, where, in a relaxed but inspiring talk Ron Butlin said several things about the process of compostion which started my own processes. The first was something that resonated with me, as it's something I think about a lot:
that poetry is something that happens behind the words.

Perhaps it's obvious to everyone - but if that's the case why is there so much shapeless boneless poetry about? Poetry, it seems to me, is as much about shape and flow and pattern as it is about language. Without this you just get a search for ever more quirky or bizarre images and themes, a list of banned images (rememeber the seagulls/shards debate that rampaged last year?) and a poetry that becomes ever more cerebral and remote.

The other was something less comfortable - in summary, that it isn't possible to write about a subject that you know too well, because you have nowhere to go with it, and nothing to gain from the writing process. It's made me question a lot of assumptions about what I want to write; it's not that I think I'm writing the same poems over and over, or the same subjects, but that I'm trying to write about subjects I've already over-thought. Poetry might work better if it wasn't so much a record of where I've been, as the first phase of exploring where I'm going. Feels kind of weird - a new way to balance thought and feeling, but interesting, interesting---

Also, I'm delighted and honoured to be able to say that I've a poem in the new issue (issue 3) of the elegant and thoughhtful on-line magazine Poetandgeek

First Territory Walk of 2012 - Feet on Solid Ground

2012-01-01T15:26:00.001Z

Last year was a real roller-coaster. Of course it had its glorious moments - the chief of which in my life was the launch of Wherever We Live Now but for an awful ot of people there was a sense of loss and closure and dismay. Some careers ended, som relationships went through the mill, some people had to accept the realities of living with illness and old age, and whatever illusions we'd been nurturing about a quick end to recession and return to normal, or about the Arab Spring were firmly squashed.
But out of all this seems to have come a certain sense of clarity and a new start. We may not be where we thought we were, but our feet are on solid ground now, and we can make a new start. So this is what I've been doing, taking advantage of a bright morning to go for a first territory walk, and establish exactly what trees there are along the river road.

The youngest trees are these oak seedlings, planted by the farmer three years ago. The guards are to keep the rabbits off the vulnerable shoots, and so far it seems to be working.

These are young alders, growing right on the river bank. The river is tidal and shallow here, so they often have their feet in water, which they like, so they should do well.

There are many sallows on the other bank, but this is the only one along this stretch on our side. If you've followed the blog for a while, you'll have seen photos of the larger green willows that are more typical.

And this is the most common tree on this bank, a big ash, covered in ivy.

There are also hawthorns, brambles elders wild roses and honeysuckle, and round the factory there are sycamores, rowans, cypreeses and larches, most of which were planted as screens or ornamental plantings. I'm planning to do this walk regularly, focussing this year on the birds and flowering plants I see, and to try and understand more about this square mile I live in.

Time For Renewal

2011-12-20T11:46:00.003Z

After the winds came snow, and then more wind, then rain, and then frost. This snowman was the first of a family of snow people my husband made for our grand-daughter.

Now we are getting ready for Christmas. We'll be seeing all the children on Christmas Day, and then hopefully, going south for a family party in Chesterfield, and coming back for New Year.

Next year is time for big changes. On a mundane level, this computer, which has served me pretty well for five years, is now showing its age. It coughs and splutters whenever anything updates, and none of the new software is talking to any of the old stuff. It's time to move on. So if there's a bit of a lull over the next three weeks or so, you will know I am wrestling with Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2010, and wondering just where I backed everything up.

In the garden, there won't be too much upheaval, but I'll be consolidating some of the changes I made last year, getting to understand the greenhouse and veg patch better, and adding some fruit bushes. I'm learning a bit mre about the birds in the garden, too, moving the bird feeders away from the flight path of the sparrowhawk, and creating nest-spaces for wrens - possibly my favourite garden bird. According to the fascinating A-B-Tree project run by Mandy Haggith at Cybercrofter, wrens like to nest in bramble thickets, because of the difficulty predators have in getting through the tangles. I can't imagine I'll get away with planting brambles in the garden, but we do have some very thorny and tangled wild roses, and this

juniper, just about as impenetrable as any small bird could want. You can see all the A-B-Tree postshere.

This year has been a hard one, with some problems coming to a head, some major milestones reached, some big changes made. Some people think that 2012 is going to be a year of major upheaval for the whole world, but apparently the Mayan prophecy is not meant to be about the end of time, but about the renewal of life. I wish all my friends, family and readers of this blog a happy Christmas holiday, and a peaceful time for renewal, refreshment and joy.

Hurricane Bawbag

2011-12-08T14:48:00.001Z

Ok there's no snow. But do you see the greenhouse windows?

Those two lower panes blew out. They went up, over the top of the greenhouse, and landed one here

and one on top of the herbs. And they are completely undamaged. I have no idea how this could be possible. I've stacked them in the gulley between the garden and the house and I hope the wind doesn't get them there.

The Steel Garden by Lorna Waite

2011-12-08T09:23:00.000Z

I am particularly interested in the links between landscape and languages and communities. It comes up in my work a fair bit - particularly poems like Goes Without Saying and the Eurydice sequence, (it will be all over the Territory of Rain poems too) and I dealt with the topic in my review of Christine de Luca's North End of Eden published in the March issue of Northwords Now, which you can read here.

At first glance you wouldn't think Lorna Waite's poetry had much in common with Christine de Luca's. It is grittily urban, unashamedly acadeemic, and quite possibly the most committed political and philosphical poetry in Scotland since MacDiarmid (whose work it vividly recalls). But what both poets are saying is that the life and heart of a community is in the way it inhabits its own particular hills, mountains, fields, rivers and coasts, the work by which people earn their living, the art they create, the lives they remember and the language they develop to tell their own stories.

Just as Christine de Luca's poetry deals with isolated island communities, but transcends nostalgia and romanticism, Lorna Waite records the devastation of post-industrial urban communities without portraying them as victims. The people of Kilbirnie are not statistics, social studies or pupppets of a callous economic system, they are a vibrant creative community, expressing themselves through steel and sculpture, stories and music. These are poems about strength, not weakness; they are angry at defeat, not mourning a loss.

There is mourning here, however,and there are also more personal poems. If the feminist slogan was 'the personal is political', Lorna Waite demonstrates that the political is most profoundly personal, not to say passionate. She engages with social changes, clearances, migration and the class war through her friendships, family, archaeology and, in a profound and fascinating way, through her relationship with hill, burn, mountain and woodland, and with Gaelic.

I don't think I can do this book justice. This poetry is completely outside my comfort zone, it doesn't have much of what I usually demand of a poem, and I'm only just beginning to get to grips with all that does have. But, like Neruda, Lorna Waite is a poet I can see myself coming back to again and again. Go read it, and tell me what you think. You won't be sorry.

The Steel Garden is published by Word Power Books.

Frost and Fire

2011-12-05T11:33:00.001Z

still winter evening
seeds and gardeners pause, withdraw,
frost outside, fire within

High Tide on the Forth

2011-12-01T12:08:00.001Z

All the rain earlier this week has soaked the ground and caused the river to burst its banks. This isn't the worst it's ever been by a long way, but look how deep the water is around those trees.

Life is fairly complicated right now. When you're one of a large family and you marry into a large family, there's always someone doing something interesting, from art exhibitions and gigs to picketing (we are all pro the Public Workers - and indeed I don't know anyone who isn't) or getting ill or needing help with stuff. But that's why the blog has been quiet. It will probably be quiet again next week while I wrestle with the NHS and the grand-daughter's Christmas shows - two of them, and she's only four. There are some heavy-duty performing genes in this family!

Today, however, the sun is shining, the house is peaceful and the winter jasmine is in full glorious flower. And I may even write some poetry, once the kitchen is clean!

New look web-site

2011-11-23T10:12:00.001Z

The Burnedthumb website has has a make-over, and as well as the enhanced design -courtesy of Naomi Rimmer it includes a couple of new pages, an updated links page (that's where all the links from here went) and some different poetry. You can access it from the image on the sidebar.

The Book is Launched

2011-11-19T14:35:00.001Z

A picture, taken by my sister Margaret, at the quadruple booklaunch organised by Red Squirrel Press for Wherever We Live Now, along with Anne Connolly's first full collection, Love-in-a-Mist, and pamphlets by Marion Montgomery (Lyart),and Pippa Little (Snow Globe), at Blackwells in Edinburgh on Tuesday. Red Squirrel must be the most dynamic publishing firm on the face of the planet!

It was a great night. With four of us, there were plenty of people there, and the poetry was varied and excellent. I've always liked Anne's poetry since her pamphlet Downside Up was published by Calderwood Press, but Marion's and Pippa's was new to me - though you can find enough of Pippa's work on line to get the flavour. My family was out in force. My husband and children were there, but my nephew, currently at Edinburgh university, came too, but my sister came from Liverpool and my mother-in-law made the long and complicated train journey from Malvern (no mean feat when you are eighty-six and using a crutch to get about). My good friend Norman Bissell came from Luing which was a great honour. Without Norman, who organised the Atlantic Island Festival and introduced me to the HI-Arts Creative Development programme, I don't suppose there would ever have been a book at all.

I read a couple of archaeology poems, a plant poem, an Irish poem and three Orpheus poems. It was good to see them in a book, with an independent life of their own. After all the euphoria and disillusionment of composition, revision, submitting and acceptance, it was fun to read them as if they had been written by someone else entirely. It was a pleasant room and Blackwell's staff were very kind and hospitable.

I'm not sure, however, that the highlight of the evening wasn't later, when we went to the Elephant House for food, and my sister and mother-in-law discovered the JK Rowling connection. It really made the night!

What You Should Know to be a Poet

2011-11-09T11:10:00.000Z

I pinched this title from Gary Snyders poem What You Should Know to be a Poet
which is a poem I found very inspiring when I came back to poetry (for about the fifth time - I used to describe myself as a recidivist poet). The point Snyder was making was that poetry had to be grounded in a deep understanding of the world around us, firstly the material facts, but also the way other humans feel about it and relate to it. Snyder's poems often read easy, but they are actually very scholarly in an extraverted way that is completely different from the narcissistic complaining or self-satisfaction that tempts those of us who spend a lot of time looking inside our own heads for stuff to work with.

But then we have to think of the kind of "knowing" we are looking for. I've been spending some time with geek poets, mostly bird-watchers. I'm interested in birds but I hate twitchers with their ticks on their life-lists and their macho competing to see some poor creature which is only here because it's lost. Frankly I'm only interested in people who love what they're doing, so the geek poets really give me pleasure even before I read the poems.

David Morley is an ecologist by background, and it shows. His poems are full of exact species names (not always Latin) and technical terms, and he avoids romantic and anthropomorphic responses to the fish, dragonflies and birds he writes about. Observations are detailed
"head-butting the surface to see
at eyelash-level the whiphands of Common Backswimmers surge
and sprint, each footing a tiny dazzle to prism."(Dragonflies)

but delighted (a perfect combination in my book). But it's not all about the creatures. There's a balanced debate about the conservation movement in Proserpina, and a reminder that climate change is not a new thing to the earth, however cataclysmic it feels to us, in The Lucy Poem.

This section of the book "Fresh Water" is only the first; there re two other sections dealing with Romany tales including Hedgehurst which reminds me a lot of Tim Atkins' Folklore, and with poems about the circus. I think I may say more about them when I've got into Morley's earlier books. They deal with alienation and estrangement and take me into territory I'd like to know more about.

Matt Merritt, however, feels to be on very familiar ground. The poems are intensely visual, and his detailed knowledge and love of birds is obvious - Loons, Ringing Redstarts, and Knots, and it's not only birds, there's a lovely one called Hares in December - but most of the poems are about love death, memory and the mutability of human relationships. They are powerful and moving at that level, but there's also something else going on that emerges as you see the book as a whole. There's a lot of stuff written just now about the fallacy of humans seeing themselves as detached or separate from nature and how we need to recognise ourselves as one with it. This doesn't seem to be a problem for Matt Merritt. There seems very little distinction between the act of living and writing - love is "written" on the sky, lives are drawn in, revised or erased across a landscape, as if humans are poems written by the earth. I like this. His writing is not just understanding but connecting.

Troy Town is an earlier book. Matt Merritt has since published a new collection called hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, and you can see some of his more recent work at his blog Polyolbion.

Artists of the Week - Nat Hall and Pat Morrissey

2011-11-08T16:48:00.000Z

Before I wind up the Lúcháir site altogether, I want to share some of the artists who have made working on it so inspiring.The first is someone who needs no introduction to most of the people who visit here. Nat Hall writes the Nordic Blackbird blog and her sensitivity to the weather and landscape of her home in Shetland and her wonderful photographs are a constant delight.

The second is someone quite new to me.This time last year I took a lot of photos "walking the territory", and put some of them up here - the banner I'm using now is one of them, and I'm still quite pleased with them. But on Saturday I shared a table with Pat Morrissey at our local Fair Trade and crafts coffee morning. He was selling beautiful cards made from photographs he took in our local gardens and on roadsides. Adds a whole new dimension, don't you think?

Putting the garden to bed

2011-11-03T10:09:00.004Z

The cuttings are tucked up in the greenhoouse

I planted the garlic. It's very early, because of last year's frost. Imeant to do it towards the end of November, and around the sixteenth the cold started and the ground froze solid until the end of January, and the green shoots are up already.

The patio is swept, the summer bedding is gone and the bulbs are all planted.

And the winter jasmine has begun to flower.

There's a little more to do before the real bad weather starts, but already my mind is moving indoors and I'm thinking about making over the web-sites, the study programme for next year, and new ventures in poetry.

One thing I'm thinking, though, and that is that I'm going to delete the Lúcháir web-site. There will still be a page for it on the burnedthumb site,and here, and the core of the project goes on. The lúcháir way of thinking, living and writing is as important as ever, but the project never quite gelled as I had hoped.

This is because I don't work or write quite the way I had always imagined I would. I love to meet people and explore what they are doing and learn from them, but essentially my creativity comes from solitude. It's not just finding peace and quiet, or escaping from distracting responsibilities - it's the way I process what I learn and turn it into poetry.

Kenneth White has a phrase which resonates with me just now. "Poet, use well, the winter". I plan to.

you have to stop for this

2011-10-31T07:56:00.001Z

This is so lovely, I just had too show it from India Flint.

Artist of the Week: Susan Kruse

2011-10-24T17:19:00.000+01:00

I've had my eye on this blog for a while, but it all went quiet over the summer. Now Susan is back with an inventive series of drawings - some of which involve the very creative defacing of books.
Welcome to my Brain: Daily drawing

The Little fawn

2011-10-19T10:00:00.002+01:00

We were at the Little Fawn Waterfall (at Aberfoyle) on Sunday. After all the recent rain, it wasn't so much a 'lithe leap' as a headlong rush, but it was very impressive all the same!

The sun is out today, although it is very cold, so I am hoping to finish planting bulbs and put the garlic in before the frost.

Artist of the Week - Gail Kelly

2011-10-16T10:46:00.003+01:00

Gail Kelly produces woodcuts inspired by the landscape of her native Northern Ireland. You can find her work at Algan Arts.

Just a Thought

2011-10-14T10:09:00.003+01:00

Image from Amazon.

Sometimes I get cross with Kenneth White.

and then sometimes amid all the cynical self-aggrandising and contemptuous ramblings (I was reading Across the Territories while I was on Islay) there's something so profound and incisive and inspiring you have to let him off.

Like this:

"the real is richer than the imagination --- The real demands investigation and is an invitation to sensitive knowledge --- then a relationship to the real and its resistance requires changes in thought, in ways of being, in ways of saying; it requires a transformation of the self --- how much more interesting an open and poetic process (is) involving contemplation, study, movement, meditation and composition." page 86

Now as I go on, I can see reservations building up. Kenneth White and I would have some major disagreements about what's real. He doesn't seem to think that much about human society is particularly real and he wouldn't have much time for my understanding of God as 'that which is most definitively real' - 'myth-malarkey' is the word he uses (and let us agree that there is a lot of myth-malarkey in what passes for religion in popular culture).

Also I'm fairly sure that there is deeper engagement in reality and more transformation of the self going on if you stay put, rather than being a nomad, and that dialogue between two (or more) people of alert and open minds might be as fruitful as an unaligned solitude, but I'm all for this process of relating to the resistant real. There's more joy in discovering the quirks and flaws and deviations and serendipities of a world which is given, than in designing a matrix that obeys the narcissistic whims of the human fantasy

Quiet Glasgow Night - Draft

2011-10-10T11:58:00.002+01:00

I'm looking over some of the scraps of poems I've got lying about. This isn't on my usual beat, but before I get back there - poems about irises and archaeology and (probably) a lot of wet leaves, what do you think? The oddness of all those incidents haunts me.

Quiet Glasgow Night

The drunk man rails at the statue.
Waste of space. Tosser. Fanny merchant.
Fanny merchant. Fanny merchant.
Dewar stares doggedly down the street.

Three boys film the skater who jumps
the railings, meets the board,
crashes at the foot of the steps.
He shakes his wrist. His knees are covered
with blood and bruises. He jumps again.

Two phones deliver, “I'm on the train.”
The blonde opposite marks up a chapter
on problems designing steam turbines.
The metaller across from me
takes out a guitar, fills the carriage
with Smoke on the Water.

Artist of the Week - Carrie Osborne

2011-10-09T09:23:00.002+01:00

There's a lot of whimsical faery artwork on the internet, but not all of it has the eye for detail and the solid grounding in the natural world of Carrie Osborne's. her children are not only pretty, but lively and humorous, and her blog includes some lovely photos and some incisive and interesting writing too.

Some grateful acknowledgements

2011-10-09T08:58:00.002+01:00

While I was away, this post appeared on Michelle Mcgrane's informative and fearsomely well-read blog Peony Moon.

And on Friday Jody Porter from the Morning Star added this post.

I am delighted and honoured to appear in such company. Thank you to Michelle and Jody for including me.

Major Hiccup

2011-10-07T11:15:00.002+01:00

Many apologies. I have hi-jacked my husband's computer for a minute to let everyone know that my own internet connection is no more (best guess, that the networking software is, to put it technically, 'gubbed') and until I get hold of a long cable or a new computer, I'll be out of touch. Back ASAP

2011-10-05T11:37:00.005+01:00

While we were on Islay we visited the Community garden at Bridgend, where the local community has taken over an abandoned walled kitchen garden and turned it into a valuable resource. Volunteers work on the plots and the produce is sold in the shop, where they leave an honesty box.

there are plenty of the usual vegetables

and a large and well-stocked herb bed

but there is also a productive fruit cage, a polytunnel with tomatoes and peppers and butternut squash

and the garden has been turned into a pleasant open space for families to visit and for children to play

I was really impressed with the range and quality of produce available. The climate must be quite benign, but they've really made the most of it. It just goes to show what a community can do when they get the chance!

You may notice that the blog has been subtly enhanced in a way that is quite beyond me, or the resources of the blogger template. This is the work of Naomi Rimmer (yes, she is related, she is my daughter). If anyone would like her to do some design and coding work on their blogs or websites I wouldbe very happy to pass on her contact details

Islay without the whisky

2011-09-28T09:27:00.004+01:00

It is hard to go to Islay without dealing with the distilleries in some form or other. There are so many of them and they dominate the landscape, the economy and, to a certain extent, the culture. We went to one of the events at the Laphroaig Jazz Festival, for instance, and we bought soap from Spirited Soaps in Bowmore which whisky in it. This is less odd than it would appear at first, as the owner Ailsa Hayes explained to us. Soap needs alchohol to make it transparent, and using the characteristic Islay malts gives her a link with the distilleries that benefits everyone.

However, neither of us has the smallest interest in whisky, and the last week was about the beautiful landscape

coastline

and wildlife we saw

This stag was on Jura, where we went for the day. Jura has a distillery but life there is dominated by the shooting estates, so it was a very different experience from Islay.

We saw eagles, hen harriers, redshanks, and curlews. We saw hares and rabbits, and migrating birds by the hundreds - geese and starlings arriving for the winters, lots of finches - goldfinches mostly but also twite and chaffinch, stonechat and whinchat passing through, and wheatears swallows and housemartins who were held up in the islands by adverse winds. This gave us a really strange mix of summer and winter birds a moment suspended in time.

Our biggest ambition was to see an otter. This is really hard, even on Islay which has many otters, and we were reminded of this when we attended a lecture at the Port Charlotte Natural History Centre on photographing Scottish Wildlife. The photographer said that it had taken hime twenty years to learn how to spot otters, and they never turned up in the same place twice.

We kept hoping, but the nearest we got to them was this

Upcoming

2011-09-16T16:36:00.003+01:00

Just a quick post in the middle of all the running around I'm doing.

Thanks to Kevin and Sheila of Red Squirrel Press, I now have copies of this book, and if anyone would like to buy one, I'll be in a position to send them out when I get back from my next expedition.

On the afternoon of 30th September I'll be reading at the Community Centre in Dalry. The event is due to start at 2:00.

I haven't done an artist of the week this week or last, but check out Kirsty Mordaunt's web-site - the link is in the sidebar to the right. She has a web comic building there, plus illustrations for a couple of my favourite fairy stories. When I come to earth again I will have a couple of new blogs to share, some artists and photographers I've come across during the summer. The internet is a truly wondrous place!

Wherever We Live Now

2011-09-08T10:16:00.008+01:00

This is the Friday night session of the Callander Poetry Weekend, where, thanks to the herculaean efforts of Sheila Wakefield and Kevin Cadwallender of Red Squirrell Press,
Wherever We Live Now emerged into the real world.

I always knew that poets were a kind and generous lot, but I was overwhelmed by the warmth of the reception it received. You know who you are - thank you to all of you who listened to me worry, enjoyed my happy moment, made me feel that it is indeed a big thing to have a book out - not to mention those who bought it and asked for signatures!

Also a very special thank you to Sally and Ian for giving us the space in their weekend! Sally was the first editor who ever published me, and the first to allow me to read at one of her events. I bet half of Scottish poets could say the same - we are all in her debt.

There were other books launched this weekend, too:

Anne Connolly's Love in a Mist also published by Red Squirrel

Ian Blakes' Remembering Falstaff and Others published by Sally and Ian King's firm Die-hard Poetry

Fred Beake's The Old Outlaw published by Shoestring press

and Deborah Tyler-Bennet's Revudeville
published by King's England Press, and her chapbook Mitton...Dyer...Sweet Billy Gibson which is to come from Nine Arches Press

Yes, I did buy them and Marion Macready's Vintage Sea (Calderwood Press) as well as pamphlets by kemal Houghton and Gordon mason. It was some weekend, and it's a good job I'm going to Islay shortly so I can catch up with all these poets!

Please email me if you would like to buy a copy, or they will shortly be available via the Red Squirrel website.

Callander Poetry

2011-09-06T09:56:00.005+01:00

Helena Nelson, from Happenstance,,
wrote about the fabulous Callander Poetry Weekend, so I'm not about to add to that, except to say thank you to Sally and Ian for the poetry, the workshops and discussions, the friends, the food, the laidback atmosphere - not to mention the chance to read from the book!

(You'll hear all about that in the next post, but this one's for Sally!)

I'll just add a few pictures:

Kevin Cadwallender, who read from His latest book
Defragmenting Sappho, as well as his familiar more comic poems (including the famous Skincare for Daleks).

Sheena Blackhall reading - and singing ( there was a fair bit of that this year)

Anne Connolly reading from her new book Love in a Mist. Sally is listening. One of the very few things wrong with Callander is that we don't hear enough of Sally's own wonderful poetry!

Two things mean Callanderto me - Colin Will starting a session by sounding aTibetan singing bowl - it got into one of the Orpheus poems - and Ian Blake listening to someone read, with a cat on his lap.

The chickens were less than impressed with the poets invading their space!

One Leaf, One Link

2011-08-30T08:39:00.002+01:00

I'm posting a link to this post from 2008 (can't believe I've been blogging so long!)

One Leaf, One Link

because earlier this year Jackie Proctor from PlusPerth, a local mental health charity, was in touch with me, saying that there was a plan to reprint One Leaf One Link an anthology to which I contributed my poem Walking on Water. For reasons to do with the way funding was given, it may not be possible for Plus to actually sell copies, so if you come across one, please make a donation to the work of this wonderful organisation.

And while I'm at it, I'd like to commend the Dundee-based organisation Art Angel, for the excellent work they do. Art isn't therapy if it's treated as a hobby or an afternoon out. But if the work and the artists are allowed their true value, it can be a voice and a lifeline. PlusPerth and Art Angel deserve all the support we can give them, and I'm away now to see how I can go about it.

Walking the Territory - end of summer

2011-08-26T08:39:00.004+01:00

Although the day was sunny and warm, once the cloud burned off, we're on borrowed time. The spring wheat isn't quite ready for harvest - I know this because there were no clouds of finches in there gathering while they may - and there are still flash mobs of young swallows over the grass, although the swifts left weeks ago. But I heard the first autumn song from the robin, and the first geese were overhead last weekend.

The rowans are blazing ripe where the blackbirds haven't scoffed and scattered them and I picked the first blackberries for crumble. Hawthorns and rose-hips will be a week or two and the elderberries maybe a weeks after that. I'm pickling the smallest of the shallot harvest and getting ready for the plums and apples. Everyone in the village seems to have trees but us, so I am very grateful for the surpluses, which I repay in plum jam and mincemeat at Christmas.

Seeds are ripening on the verges and in my garden, and I'm saving seeds of poppy, marigold, astrantia, cornflower and chervil, and many more to share with members of Towards Transition Stirling, who are holding their next cycle tour of sustainable gardens next weekend.

Artist of the Week - Fiona Robertson

2011-08-18T09:14:00.004+01:00

You get two for the price of one this week. I am a sucker for rich colours and natural forms so Fiona Robertson's web-site is always a joy. It has recently been updated by her husband, who just happens to be artist Douglas Robertson. His own beautiful web-site is here.

I haven't been looking after this blog as well as I would have liked this week, as the Edinburgh Festival is on, and, while I haven't been at anything in the actual festival, in and around the edges of this extravagance, poets have turned Edinburgh into an extended and glorious poetry party, with so much stuff going on I find myself bemused and punch-drunk.

Last week I was taking part in No Sleep in Bristo in the endangered and amazing creative space The Forest - thirty-six hours of non-stop poetry, with about a hundred poets participating. It finished up with an event called A Knife Fight in a Telephone Box, which sounds as if it was both fascinating and very funny. Unfortunately, having been sabotaged by some ravioli which turned out to contain undeclared cheese, I had to take the resulting migraine home to bed.

This Tuesday I was at three events - the Courtyard Reading hosted by Christine de Luca who read Nae Aesy Mizzer which is one of my favourite poems from her recent book North End of Eden, then Get me Out of Here, organised by the Grey Hen press - fierce and funny poems by women of 'a certain level of experience'. They included among others my friends AC Clarke, Eleanor Livingstone, and poets new to me, but names to look out for - Angela Kirby and Julia Deakin.

I hadn't the stamina to go along to Immortality Now by Andy Jackson, which was a shame as he read the title poem at the Courtyard, and it was excellent. But I did make it to the 6 Poets reading in the Fruitmarket. The six poets were Simon Barraclough, Helen Mort, Isobel Dixon, Helen Ivory, Andrew Philip and Rob Mackenzie - a diverse collection of poets all very different from me in styles and themes and preoccupations, but all the more interesting for that. And, as at all the best parties, I met friends and caught up with all the news and made plans for the next time---

This will be at the Callander Poetry Weekend where, if everything goes to plan, I'll be able to see the first copies of Wherever We Live Now. And that really will be some party.

Artist of the Week Vic MacRae

2011-08-11T10:47:00.003+01:00

This weeks artist is 'outside artist' and animator Vic MacRae. Her work is vibrant, colourful and thought-provoking.

Also I noticed that someone was looking up the spirituality articles on the burnedthumb site and the links were broken. I've fixed them now, if you would like to check again.

August in the Garden

2011-08-09T10:01:00.004+01:00

A picture post, because the garden is calling:
Thinking about saving seed for next year

The harvest is in sight

If you have two loaves, sell one and buy a lily---

Please Note

2011-08-05T08:57:00.003+01:00

There has been a glitch in the arrangements for our book launch, and it is going to be rescheduled. Pleae watch this space - I'll let everyone know as soon as we have the new date.

Also I'm registering the blog with Technorati (VKSKVKQB45VZ) to make it easier to find.

Can't Keep it Quiet

2011-08-02T11:58:00.003+01:00

I'm really busy just now:
choosing poems to read at No Sleep at Bristo, the Poetry Marathon organised by Kevin Cadwallender, which will take http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifplace in the Forest Café over the 11th and 12th August. I'll be reading at 11 o'clock on Friday morning.

deciding which of the many poetry events I'll be at in Edinburgh on 16th August. There are at least five happening (you'd think there was a festival on or something), but all I know is that I'll be starting at Courtyard Readings which is hosted by Anne Connolly.

updating the Burnedthumb web-site and getting ready to check the proofs of my book. It's really all happening now, and Wherever We Live Now will be launched at Blackwells Bookshop in Edinburgh on September 13th. It should be a brilliant night, as books by Anne Connolly and Marion Montgomery are being launched at the same time. Pictures later, as soon as we are organised!

Artists of the week - Peatbog Faeries

2011-07-28T11:28:00.003+01:00

Probably no-one needs any introduction to the
Peatbog Faeries, but I picked them as this weeks artists because of the title track from their album Faerie Stories. It has a backing track of swifts flying round a house in Nice belonging to a friend - very timely just now with swifts everywhere. I was trying to find a clip of it to link to so you could hear it but I wasn't able to. There are some tracks on their web-site, though - enjoy

Artist of the Week - Christine de Luca

2011-07-21T10:14:00.004+01:00

The marigolds are subbing for the sunshine which is currently lacking in our garden. We've had about 70mm of rain this week, and it's only Thursday!

This weeks artist is the Edinburgh based but Shetland-born poet Christine de Luca. She writes in both English and Shetlandic, and you can find my review of her latest book North End of Eden, which was published by Northwords Now

here.
You can also hear her reading at the School of Poets Courtyard Readings
on 16th August.

Artist of the Week - Margaret Bennett

2011-07-15T09:35:00.003+01:00

This week's artist is the singer, story-teller and folklorist

Margaret Bennett.

As well as being a wonderful performer in her own right, Margaret is a gifted teacher. In 2009 she was teaching Gaelic singing to a class on Luing, and a blackbird joined in. She stopped the children so they could listen to it, but the blackbird stopped too, waiting for them to sing again. maybe blackbirds sing in Gaelic?

A quick reminder that the Spokes and Spades Renewable Garden tour starts at my garden tomorrow - if you want to join it, be at the Village hall, South Street Cambuskenneth at 10.30.

July garden pictures

2011-07-08T10:47:00.004+01:00

The garden is full of sun today, so I thought I'd let you see how things are growing and flowering.
We started digging the early potatoes last week, but these need another week or two.

The sweet peas are just hitting their stride. I got the oldfashioned mix for their scent, but the colours are amazing too. At the end of the season I'll be saving seeds for next year.

These cranesbill geraniums seed themselves all over the garden, but the bees love them.

The gallica roses are over so fast but the scent is rich and wild and heady. I love it.

Poems to the Sea - a tribute to Cy Twombly

2011-07-06T08:27:00.002+01:00

I usually find modern art challenging. I like it to be naturalistc and I have a preference for beautiful - which makes me fairly illiterate, I know. So Cy Twombly's exhibition at Tate Modern a couple of years ago was really challenging. But when I got it - I really fell for it. I was sad to hear of his death this morning, and post this poem in tribute to his "Poems to the Sea"

Poems to the Sea by Cy Twombly

Twenty-four slabs of white on white
blue constant horizon paint splashes
faint wisps of pencil

Mediterranean white white white
and when the sun comes up
becoming a lighter white

wave current ripcurl swell
weed flotsam bubbles spume
implicit goddess

painting the process of water
flows and falls of cloud
rain meeting ocean

painting the process of poem
words aimed shifted retracted
mind meeting paper

scribbles arrows overlays
the shape it takes on the page
the reveal in the process

Artist of the week Richard Ashrowan film-maker

2011-07-05T08:56:00.002+01:00

Richard Ashrowan is based in the Scottish borders and makes films of intense observation of the natural world. My favourite (so far) isLament,http://www.ashrowan.co a study of the landscape where he lives and which he describes as 'odd and empty'. It is brooding and atmospheric and reminds me of the muckle sangs and the battle-scarred history of that part of the world.

Posting may be scanty for a while. We have major family stuff going on, which may result in a change of emphasis in my work. I'll be keeping up with everyone on line, as far as I can, but possibly not be very active myself.

Artist of the Week June Waley plus upcoming cycling garden tour

2011-06-27T10:29:00.007+01:00

There's exciting stuff happening in Stirling.

First is an exhibition of photographs by my friend June Waley - beautiful details of landscapes and natural forms, sometimes standing alone, sometimes put together to create composite pictures - stunningly beautiful.

Then on July 16th Towards Transition Stirling have organised the Spokes and Spades tour of interesting gardens - not beautifully planted, elegantly maintained show-gardens, but gardens for people who want to be a bit more eco-friendly, a bit more neighbourly or a bit more self-sufficient - or maybe just have a bit more fun with their outdoor spaces.

It's starting with mine - I'm 'early permaculture'. Maybe I'll see you here.

Artist of the Week - CarryAkroyd

2011-06-21T08:29:00.002+01:00

I was reminded of Carry Akroyd's work yesterday by a prompt from the Scottish Poetry Library about this event at the Edinburgh Royal Botanical Gardens.
Carry Akroyd is an artist and printmaker, who is inspired by nature and landscape, and especially by the work of the poet John Clare (one of my favourite Romantic writers).

Artists of the week Cantu Nustrale

2011-06-07T12:07:00.002+01:00

This weeks' artists are a Corsican group we heard in Aix last summer. Have a listen. the sound is rich, multi-layered, a little bit wild. You've never heard anything like it.
Cantu Nustrale

The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

2011-06-06T16:46:00.002+01:00

I struggled with this book to be honest. I kept wanting to disagree with some of the statements in it, such as that you can't imagine a drawer without something in it. Believe me, since the day I read it, I have been doing that very thing on a regular basis. So much of what Bachelard says seems to me so much a product of his era and social class that I wondered how relevant it can be to us here and now.

That is part of the point of phenomenology, however. We do bring who, and when, and where we are to the activity of perception, and it's silly (if not, in practice, impossible) to try to disregard it. However, when he was thinking about furniture he was moving into a reflection on light and darkness, comfort and vulnerabilty, and I couldn't get past the smell of lavender and beeswax. Maybe I should write a poetics of housework!

As I went through the book, however, I began to see something more profound. My perceptions of shells, caves, cupboards and cellars might well be different from someone else's, but imagining and daydreaming about them brings us all to profound experiences of such common themes as light and darkness, secrecy and disclosure, intimacy and isolation, transcendence and insignificance.

I am really intrigued about his differences with Freudian psychoanalysts. All this stuff, they say, is just a way of thinking about sex. But Bachelard says that sexual experience is so profound because it is a way of getting to grips with all this stuff - about who we are in the world and how we are going to get along with it all. And that seems a bit more useful than nostalgia for a comfortable (pre-war, well-to-do provincial French) home.

I have put links to some green fairs on the Lúcháir events page. They all seem to be happening in England, however. Scotland doesn't seem to have so many,(perhaps it's the weather) but keep a lookout for the Spades and Spokes extravaganza in Stirling in July. I'll post more about this when I get back from holiday.

See you all later! pax et bene!

The Garden in June

2011-06-02T12:22:00.006+01:00

I was supposed to be weeding the roses this morning, but somehow I kept finding more interesting things to do. Like staking the pumpkin so I could make the most of this flower:

or sowing some crocus seeds I found under the rowan tree,

noticing how the furry leaves of this mullein trap the dew,

watching bumblebees on the thyme flowers

or discovering plants I thought I'd lost, thriving somewhere unexpected. So far I've found two sorts of campanula, tansy, sweet violets and lily of the valley, as well as this lovely welsh poppy.

And, of course, listening to the song of the
skylark. I think they must be out in the fields that surround the village, but it sounds as if they were overhead, pouring their songs into my garden.

Artist of the Week - Marja-Leena-Rathje

2011-05-31T10:36:00.005+01:00

This weeks artist is the Finnish-Canadian printmaker and photographer Marja-Leena-Rathje

Her blog features really stunning photographs of rocks, landscape formationsand natural objects, sometimes stark, sometimes sinuously curved, always beautiful and never twee.

After the Gales

2011-05-30T15:39:00.004+01:00

Last week's gales caused an awful lot of damage here. We lost two panes of glass from the greenhouse when it was at its worst. The whole house shook and it sounded like armageddon. I don't remember ever being quite so worried by the wind all the time we've been here, though it wasn't the worst we've had. I think it was because the trees are in full leaf. It may not be quite as fierce as a winter gale, but it was certainly noisy. And the trees along the river bank really took a hammering.

It's much quieter now, and the sun is out - a really good washing day. So that's what I'm doing.

Two recommendations

2011-05-26T10:28:00.005+01:00

Please Note: One of my projects is to work with the Justice and Peace group of the Archdicese of Edinburgh and St Andrews to develop an environmental perspective on our work, so from time to time there may be posts on this blog which refer explicitly to Catholic teaching on various issues. This is not an attempt to convert anybody, nor to denigrate the wisdom of other faith traditions or philosphical points of view. If you're not Catholic, just talk amongst yourselves for a bit.

First the serious one. Lush cosmetics are promoting a petition from No One Is Illegal. I know that the shops smell like an explosion in an eight year-olds dressing up box, but Lush really do seem to live up to their ideals, and this about immigration really is an important issue to me.

To get a little heavy for a minute: there is a Papal Encyclical called Populorum Progressio which came out in 1968 and is at the foundation of catholic Social teaching, and it says:

"We cannot insist too much on the duty of giving foreigners a hospitable reception. It is a duty imposed by human solidarity and by Christian charity, and it is incumbent upon families and educational institutions in the host nations.

Young people, in particular, must be given a warm reception; more and more families and hostels must open their doors to them. This must be done, first of all, that they may be shielded from feelings of loneliness, distress and despair that would sap their strength. It is also necessary so that they may be guarded against the corrupting influence of their new surroundings, where the contrast between the dire poverty of their homeland and the lavish luxury of their present surroundings is, as it were, forced upon them. And finally, it must be done so that they may be protected from subversive notions and temptations to violence, which gain headway in their minds when they ponder their "wretched plight.'' (58) In short, they should be welcomed in the spirit of brotherly love, so that the concrete example of wholesome living may give them a high opinion of authentic Christian charity and of spiritual values.

68. We are deeply distressed by what happens to many of these young people. They come to wealthier nations to acquire scientific knowledge, professional training, and a high-quality education that will enable them to serve their own land with greater effectiveness. They do get a fine education, but very often they lose their respect for the priceless cultural heritage of their native land.

69. Emigrant workers should also be given a warm welcome. Their living conditions are often inhuman, and they must scrimp on their earnings in order to send help to their families who have remained behind in their native land in poverty. "

(you thought we only go on about sex? Silly you!)

I am including this rather preachy bit because there are various high-profile Catholic politicians who got asked to speak for the Church, and pontificated about moral values while at the same time bringing in laws ro restrict the rights of immigrants and refugees,lock up their children and use them as hostages to make sure their parents leave the country quietly.

Please stand up for the rights of people to find work and peace and stabilty for their children where they can.

The second recommendation is more fun. If you get the chance go and see Stirling Castle. They have just finished an enormous restoration project on the Palace Apartments, and they are wonderful.

Floss of Troc, Broc and Recup has also agrred to do the Green Chain interview. She is on a break just now, but do look out for it when she gets back!

How Bad Are Bananas Mike Berners-Lee - Review

2011-05-25T09:19:00.002+01:00

Published 2010 by Profile Books

This book is not so much about how to cut your carbon footprint, but attempts in a chatty and informal way to provide a way through the morass of information and misinformation on the subject. It takes many familiar issues - using dishwashers, food miles, flying and so on, analyses why they might present a problem and evaluates how big a problem this might be.

In other words, it gives a context for all your good intentions, exposes some myths (for instance, that cotton is always preferable to man-made fabrics, or that bananas are a problem), and enables you to set priorities and make sensible choices, instead of operating, as we mostly seem to do, on a mash-up of taboos and political correctness, for example, agonising over whether organic vegetables from Kenya are better than local conventional ones.

It also exposes the assumptions behind some popular assertions - that a dishwasher is more eco-friendly than handwashing (not in my house it isn't!) which enables you to check your own practice against the recommendations you get from elsewhere. All in all, a useful and interesting read.

Artist of the Week

2011-05-24T10:01:00.005+01:00

I am tinkering once again with the Lúcháir website. I'm much busier now than I was last year, and so some pages are not being updated as much as they really should be. Also, I'm getting better at working out what a web-site can do well and what it can't, and shifting my focus to more of the former and less that would be better done some other way.

I'm particularly disappointed in the gallery page. Doing what I originally intended ie showcasing the work of the artists crafters and photographers I love, is beyond me, so I'm having a total re-think. In the meantime however, I did find a lot of truly beautiful artists' blogs that I'd like to share, and here's the first.

The Floating Bridge of Dreams

Roxana Ghita illustrates some very exciting poetry with the most beautiful, moody and evocative photos I have ever seen. Marion Macready is using one of her pictures on the jacket of her forthcoming poetry collection, so that gives me two reasons to be impatient to see it!

Green Chain Interview

2011-05-19T10:13:00.009+01:00

This was posted yesterday, but I removed it when some difficulty arose with contacting green Chain. As the firm have been very prompt and helpful in resolving the issue, Iam very pleased to reinstate it.
Turning the heating down by just one degree in your house saves 240kg of CO2 a year. It would take eight trees to soak up this amount of CO2! Are you currently doing anything to make your home eco-friendly?

We draught-proofed and insulated as far as you can in an old house, and have the thermostat turned down as low as we can bear it.

- Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth's land surface, now they only cover 2%. How are you reducing your use of paper?

Working on-line saves paper, though I do wonder about our electricity consumption! In addition we re-use and recycle as much as possible. For instance I shred sensitive documents and add them to the compost heap.

- At PriceMinister we believe that trading second hand items online is a great way to extend the life span of products. Have you ever thought of buying or selling second hand items on or off line?

I buy a lot of second hand books! both on-line and off line. I think ourfirst flat was almost entirely furnished from auctions, but that's not so easy now, as we'd have to travel much further. Apart from books (where I know what I'm getting)I'd be less happy to buy second hand on-line. I like to look things over first.

- One of the biggest environmental challenges we face is Freshwater Shortages. Are you taking measures to reduce your water consumption?

We use a low-consumption shower and toilet, don't have a dishwasher and don't run the washing machine unless it's full. In this area we don't need to water the garden much, but I do plant with an eye to making best use of the rain we get, rather than allowing it to run-off into the drains and create flood risks.
- How do you choose the produce that goes into your shopping basket? (any favorite products?)

In order of priorities, I try to shop fo
fair trade (this includes British goods - farmers' markets give producers a much better deal than supermarkets)
fresh
seasonal
local
organic. Organic is a complicated one, and I'm not consistent. I am aware of many high quality producers who do the work but can't be bothered with the hassle of certification. It's always worth checking out organic suppliers though, as those who care enough to go organic often also care about animal welfare, working conditions and community involvement. I'd recommend farmers'markets, but don't want to single out any one product.

- What is your favourite green space near home? (a photo would be great!)
Apart from my garden - which gets a fair amount of exposure on this blog already - I like this

It looks towards the Ochil Hills. It's always lovely.

- Which charity would you like to support and why?

I'd like to support Trees for Cities. Apart from the environmental benefits of greening up urban areas, it's important to remember that most of us live in cities. Green movements often focus on the countryside, but negative attitudes towards towns will only alienate those who live there. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
If any bloggers would like to take part in this challenge, and raise money for one of PriceMinister's three designated environmental charities, please let me know, and I'll tag you.

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Walking the Territory - Climate and Micro-climates

2011-05-17T11:25:00.003+01:00

This is a photograph of the territory of rain in January, when we actually had some, and what there was, was augmented by snowmelt after the hard winter. Normally there is an awful lot of rain, especially in May, which has heavy showers and sunny intervals, so that you dash in and out with the washing and there are spectacular rainbows spanning the river, or across the face of the hill, or with their feet in the orchard opposite. Often this happens at the end of a cold dry spell with an easterly airdrift (too sullen and reserved to be called a wind) which doesn't bring frosts here, but keeps the gardens hanging dryly between daffodil and roses, and is hellish depressing. Then you get the winds from the south-west, and the air softens and brightens and all the green bulks up, and the gardens are full of nestlings fledging and harassed adult birds stuffing their bills with all the invertebrates that have ventured onto the soil surface.

Last week we had that rain, earlier than usual and now the wind is in the south and the sky is grey from Dumyat to Grangemouth - which fortunately I can't see from here, being too low down.

The village is just about at sea level, deep in the Forth Valley, and this has consequences for the weather we get. It is (mostly) marginally warmer than other places - Dunblane can have snow when we have rain - and sheltered from the worst of the winds. It isn't all good. when Falkirk had sun and wind and a thaw at Christmas we had mist and ice, and as the water pipe coming into our house had frozen solid, this was particularly disappointing. People who have hay fever and asthma often have more problems here than in other places too, because pollens and pollutants don't disperse so well. We have more rain than Edinburgh, but less than Glasgow, and tend to be a degree or so cooler than the BBC forecast in summer and a degree or so warmer than it in winter.

But even within the village there are differences in the climate. Sometimes we can see our neighbour's garden white wth frost when ours isn't. Ours is narrower and enclosed by a tall hedge on two sides, is more densely lanted and includes two good-sized trees and a pond which acts as a heat sink, just raising the temperature enough to keep above freezing point.

We have cooler areas to the north side of the herb patch and warmer ones, like the patio which gets all the late afternoon sun, and the south-facing wall of the house which is painted white. This only works in summer, though, when the sun is high enough to compensate for the fact that its lower than the rest of the garden which creates a frost pocket.

Winds behave differently in our garden too. The prevailing wind is from the south-west, but the one that does the damage is from the east, because the fence on that side creates turbulence.

All of this is going to help me get the best out of my garden. I'll be able to work out which plaants are going to need most watering. Pots of beans tomatoes and pumpkins can be moved to get the best of the sun, and plants which need staking can be placed where the wind won't be so fierce. Mints and parsley go in the shade of the herb patch, and strawberry plants will go at the top to catch the heat rising off the yard. I'll know where plants need to be brought into the greenhouse, and where I can take a chance.

may garden

2011-05-11T11:02:00.007+01:00

Eighteen months ago our garden looked like this:

It went through a lot of changes and looked a bit bleak for a while

but now it looks like this:

It has a kitchen garden

easy access to the pond, without getting too muddy

the herb bed got a makeover so it gets more sun

and we have a screen to hide the compost bins for honeysuckle and sweet briar roses to climb. This year the bed is half-hardy annuals for late summer colour, but next year I am trying to think of bee-friendly perennial plants, possibly heathers.

I am really chuffed!

Hekla's Country

2011-05-10T08:43:00.002+01:00

Polyolbion reminded me about the prograamme on BBC$ tonight about the sagas. It's part of the Iceland season, which I'm really looking forward to. So here's a poem I wrote about my trip to Iceland some years ago. It first appeared in Northwords Now in 2008, I think.
Hekla's Country
Hekla, 'the hooded', stands on the skyline.
She broods over a sorcerer’s country,
her bitter, burning malice cloaked in snow.
She is the origin of the sulphur reek,
the cinder tracks, the clouds of dust,
the streams which run ice-blue and steaming,
and the thin soil, bound with roots of lupins
like cobalt flames among the knee-high pines.

She is the gate of hell. When she erupts,
she fills the air with ash and poison
and, for months, the sounds of souls in torment.
She buried Gaukur's house at Stong
metres deep in tephra. Yet her fields are green.
The hills above the whale-backed sea are curved
as softly as the flanks of sleeping cats.
They chalice sun and wind like wine.

Her wiles ensnared Gunnar Hamundarson.
The witch betrayed him to a hero's death
with strands of Hallgerd Longlegs' golden hair -
that's how they tell it now. The saga says
Hlidarend was too beautiful to leave.
His horse stumbled, and he looked back
at golden cornfields and the new-mown hay.
I’m going home,” he said. “I will not go away.”

The afternoon I stood at Hlidarend
below the church, and looked out at the sea,
I thought of Gunnar singing in his grave,
and understood. My heart roots in this place.
I long for Hekla's country in my dreams.
I keep a piece of tephra on my shelf,
and sometimes sniff my jacket seams for dust
that smells of sulphur, rock and Iceland.

The Least Incident

2011-05-05T11:14:00.003+01:00

Over the brightening pool
a soft breeze shakes a cobweb.
Dewdrops scatter.

Walking the Territory - the Soil

2011-05-02T16:47:00.003+01:00

It's not as easy as you might think to tell what sort of soil you've got from the plants growing in it. For instance, we have lots of foxgloves in the garden, so you might think our soil was a bit dry, and rather acid. However, they've actually self-seeded from cultivars I planted on purpose, so it doesn't prove anything.
On the hill, it's a bit easier. it's almost classic - heather and a little blaeberry at the top showing the soil is thin, dry and acid, bracken at lower levels - still acid, but trapping more water, and some nutrition from the leaf litter, and then at river level, rushes, which thrive on the river silt, and horsetails

showing where the subsoil is wet.

The soil is a bit richer at this level, too, so we have brambles

cuckoo flower, which likes moisture

and elderflower, which likes its soil rich and damp.

There are patches of thick sticky clay, too, but in the village, the ground has been cutivated for centuries, and, although it's a little bit acid rather than alkaline, it's good and fertile, and gardening is a joy apart from the slugs!

poem fragments

2011-04-26T10:15:00.004+01:00

It seems a while since there was any actual poetry on this blog, so it's time to redress the balance. As I'm working my way through Patrick Whitefield's "The Living Landscape", I've begun to write a sequence of poems about my home territory. Here are bits of the newer ones, still in draft form.

(from)The Territory of Rain
This is the territory of rain.
It is king here, more than cold or wind,
and all living is by negotiation
with flows and falls of water.

Earth and sky are heavy with it.
Peat grips it like a miser's fist.
River runs muddy as it sloughs
the silt from bank and hillside.
It winks between grass stems,
silvers pot-holes in the tarmac,
attacks roofs with soft persistence,
slips between slate and timber.

(from) Grounded
In the gardens the soil is deep, dark and full
of broken china, rubble of half-bricks, the bony
broken bowls of clay pipes. As I dig the kitchen bed,
seeds from other gardeners, poppy, columbine,
marigold and wild pansy, come to light, and flower
rowdily among the onions. Neither first here
nor last, I leave seeds too – borage, nasturtium
blue-flowered alkanet. They'll never be rid of me -
I'll be here, recidivist gardener, grounded on earth.

April in the Garden

2011-04-23T09:45:00.003+01:00

We took a short break up north in Helmsdale last weekend. The weather was lovely, the B&B was great and we visited brochs, cairns, Viking castles and deserted villages to our hearts content. But it's meant rather erratic blogging this week.

The weather went on being lovely and I took a day to catch up with garden jobs, putting in potatoes, pricking out tomatoes and the half-hardy annuals, and planting out herbs, digging out the ground elder. It looks so innocent when it first comes up, but it has roots that tangle everywhere, and I've been fighting it ineffectually for nearly thirty years. It's worse than bindweed. The garden is almost the way I want it now, though there's a trellis to put up, some more fruit bushes to put in and space to find for more wild-life friendly plants and nest-boxes. The mulching round the roses is paying off, and most of the seeds I've sown are germinating nicely - all we need is a bit more rain.

After that, though, the week went downhill, with something nasty and postviral stealing a couple of days. But it's hard to be despondent as spring gathers full strength. The pear blossom is past its best already, but the cherry is at its peak, and the apple (my favourite) just poised to be glorious. All the trees apart from ash - always the last - are shimmering green, and there are new flowers every time I go out.

Enjoy your holiday weekend!

A Last Post in Lent

2011-04-19T09:05:00.002+01:00

This post is rather late, as I've been up north, looking at deserted villages near Helmsdale in Sutherland. The weather was beautiful, and we enjoyed exploring Helmsdale and Brora as well as Bad Bea and the Old Castle of Wick. We celebrated Palm Sunday in Brora, a tiny, but friendly parish, which set the tone for the last week in Lent. We had the belssing of the palms, and a short procession, and at the Gospel there was the reading of St Matthew's Passion. In the newsletter there was the comment:

'the phrase His blood be upon us and upon our children is a reference to the sack of Jerusalem in 68 AD and not an excuse for anti-semitismn..

This can't be said too often.

'the phrase His blood be upon us and upon our children is a reference to the sack of Jerusalem in 68 AD and not an excuse for anti-semitismn..

All my life this has been said to me, and yet, it needs saying. I'm less shocked by the bad behaviour I hear about, as people will always make excuses to blame the outsider, but what really bothered me was the story of a village in Poland where the Catholics all helped and protected their Jewish neighbours, and enabled them to escape, but were terrified that their priest would condemn them for being disloyal to their faith. How do people get their faith so mixed up?

Actually the story of the Passion has been a fairly constant example of how people often get their faith mixed up. From a sado-masochistic wallowing in the suffering and pain involved, to the interpretation of God as a strict legalistic tit-for-tat lawyer demanding that someone has to die because of the Fall, from the blaming and name-calling to the emotional blackmail that D H Lawrence describes when he imagines Christ saying, "I got this for you, Ursula Brangwen, now shut up and do as you are told", there have always been fairly dysfunctional presentations of a story that is meant to be about liberation, about forgiveness, compassion and new life.

But then, what really crucified Jesus was the dysfunctional views of our relationship with God - our fear that religion demands more than we are capable of giving, that it means conforming, no matter what the pain, that it is about punishment and rejection, and suffering for the cause. Let's not pretend that faith is all sweetness and light, consolation and reward - it can be demanding, and integrity can be painful. The way out of the messes we get ourselves into is no walk in the park. But it is, genuinely, a way out. Easter is the Good News, after all!

I wish all of you - Christians of all traditions, observers of all faiths and none, some good news, some liberation from what grieves you, some spring-time joy and new life. Happy Easter!

Walking the Territory - Spring

2011-04-13T11:36:00.003+01:00

Among the ivy there is new green

and the hawthorn trees are in exuberant fresh leaf

Everything isn't lovely however - among the nettles (no, I don't do nettle soup) are unfolding leaves of giant hogweed. It looks quite attractive when it's new, but it's decptive. It towers to about seven feet high, shading everything else out, seeds as prolifically as dandelions and has roots that go down as far as hell. And, as if that wasn't bad enough, they sting worse than nettles and can cause terrible burns to unwary children. Our council is quite good at spraying the stuff on the roadsides, but it seems impossible to keep up with it.

On the other hand, however, we do have the cuckoo flower, just getting into its stride. The pear blossom is out and the early flowering cherries,and I heard the first skylark.

A 5th PAUSE IN LENT

2011-04-11T10:35:00.002+01:00

On the 5th Sunday of Lent the readings in our church are on the themes of life and death, with the over-riding motif that God is not about sentencing to death, but about raising from the dead - we start with Ezechiel's "I am going to raise you from your graves, my people" and go on the the story of Lazarus.

A lot of people think that Christianity is all about the next life, as a kind of trade-off for all the bad stuff we have to put up with in this (along with a nice side dish of seeing people we don't like in hell-fire).

I'm thinking that the way we view death shouldn't be an excuse to postpone living in the moment, but on the contrary, it should make a radical difference to the way we live our life here and now. How would you feel if that annoying person who is giving you so much grief landed up in Heaven next to you? (You do believe in the forgiveness of sins and redemption and all that don't you?)

Here is the most challenging witness to life after death that I know of. Imagine not only forgiving your murderer, but greeting him as a brother in Heaven. When I reviewed the film "Of Gods and Men" (which was cited in the Observer yesterday as one of the best films of all time - I agree!), I lamented that there wasn't a decent translation of Chretien de Cherge's Testament on the web, and a very kind woman in Germany sent me a copy (see below). Her name is Monika Farhrenburger.

I may say that since that post I have come across a Moslem conservationist from Algeria called Hichem, who is trying to live this message out from his tradition. I feel very privileged to have got to know him and Monika.

Testament of Dom Christian de Chergé

                                                                    (opened on Pentecost Sunday, May 26, 1996)

                                                                                                                                    Facing a GOODBYE....
If it should happen one day - and it could be today -
that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf
all the foreigners living in Algeria,
I would like my community, my Church and my family
to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country.
I ask them to accept the fact that the One Master of all life
was not a stranger to this brutal departure.
I would ask them to pray for me:
for how could I be found worthy of such an offering?
I ask them to associate this death with so many other equally violent ones
which are forgotten through indifference or anonymity.
My life has no more value than any other.
Nor any less value.
In any case, it has not the innocence of childhood.
I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil
which seems to prevail so terribly in the world,
even in the evil which might blindly strike me down.
I should like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity
which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God
and of my fellow human beings,
and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down.
I could not desire such a death.
It seems to me important to state this.
I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice
if the people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder.
It would be too high a price to pay
for what will perhaps be called, the "grace of martyrdom"
to owe it to an Algerian, whoever he might be,
especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam.
I am aware of the scorn which can be heaped on the Algerians indiscriminately.
I am also aware of the caricatures of Islam which a certain Islamism fosters.
It is too easy to soothe one's conscience
by identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideology of its extremists.
For me, Algeria and Islam are something different: it is a body and a soul.
I have proclaimed this often enough, I think, in the light of what I have received from it.
I so often find there that true strand of the Gospel
which I learned at my mother's knee, my very first Church,
precisely in Algeria, and already inspired with respect for Muslim believers.
Obviously, my death will appear to confirm
those who hastily judged me naïve or idealistic:
"Let him tell us now what he thinks of his ideals!"
But these persons should know that finally my most avid curiosity will be set free.
This is what I shall be able to do, God willing:
immerse my gaze in that of the Father
to contemplate with him His children of Islam
just as He sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ,
the fruit of His Passion, filled with the Gift of the Spirit
whose secret joy will always be to establish communion
and restore the likeness, playing with the differences.
For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs,
I thank God, who seems to have willed it entirely
for the sake of that JOY in everything and in spite of everything.
In this THANK YOU, which is said for everything in my life from now on,
I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today,
and you, my friends of this place,
along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families,
You are the hundredfold granted as was promised!
And also you, my last-minute friend, who will not have known what you were doing:
Yes, I want this THANK YOU and this GOODBYE to be a "GOD-BLESS" for you, too,
because in God's face I see yours.
May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both.
AMEN !   INCHALLAH !

Algiers, 1st December 1993
Tibhirine, 1st January 1994

Christian +

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abrams

2011-04-08T11:52:00.002+01:00

David Abrams is a magician as well as an anthropologist and critic, so has a really interesting take on the concept of 'spell'. It comes down to the fact that when a person knows somethng intimately and practices a craft to the point where it becomes second nature, it looks like 'magic' to an observer. But it isn't - it's knowledge and skill.

But this combination of knowledge and skill isn't somthing our culture is good at. We are very good at learning vast quantities of information; we are pretty good at organising and storing and accessing information, and astonishingly good at communicating it (less good at evaluating it, however!).

What Abrams points out is not only that information is different from knowledge - it's static, verifiable, presumed to be universal when verified, and requires intellectual detachment - but the pursuit of information rather than knowledge changes our relationship to the world in which we live - greatly to our detriment. Not only do we lose access to the skills and knowledge acquired by the 'magician', but we become increasingly isolated from the earth, and ignorant about the way we need to treat it. In primitive societies people lived in dialogue to all the living creatures, and even the earth itself. Once we became literate, or more accurately, privileged the kinds of knowledge conferred by literacy over the rest, we tallked only to other humans, or perhaps only literate humans, and since the internet gives us access to so many people that we must be selective, only to those humans who reflect our own world vision.

It's a compelling argument, and backed up by a lot of interesting and convincing research. I have reservations however. I don't think those skills and that kind of knowledge arequite so lost as Abrams imagines. Anyone who practises a craft, works with animals with any dedication, tends a garden or tries to observe wildlife; anyone who looks after small children or provides care for the sick or for people in difficulty, is learning other ways of knowing and relating to the world around us. Many of the experiences Abrams has to go to indigenous tribes to discover are a regular part of life for urban western people who aren't confined to a university or a bank. But it is true, and dangerously true, that this kind of knowledge and skill, that implies relationship rather than detachment, experience rather than validation, and is fluid, adaptive and relative rather than static and verifiable, is despised in certain quarters. And those are the quarters who have the money and the power and where decisions are made.

Also I must admit that I have a soft spot for the static, verifiable, scientific kind of knowledge. I am by nature impulsive, emotional and adaptive. I do the relational sort of response all the time. It's not always the right thing to do. Often it makes decision-making incredibly difficult and it leaves you fairly vulnerable to bullying and manipulation. An ability to sort things out, get organised,detach yourself from the whirlwind or the bog of the immediate situation, make comparisons and evaluate your information can be pretty damn' valuable now and then.

Anyway, if we stopped being literate, who would read this book?

A Poem for an Artist

2011-04-07T09:41:00.002+01:00

Here's a poem I wrote for the dyer and eco-alchemist India Flint. I hope to include it in the poetry collection which is due to come out in August.
India's Alchemy
For India Flint
How she simmers mashed leaves,
shredded roots, pounded bark and berries
until the colour flows, and bleeds
into kettles, and stains her hands,

how the mordant bonds and brightens,
and how the air transforms
the white to rust and umber,
green indigo to bright blue,

and how some stains are welcome.
Silk drinks up the sap of leaf and flower,
colours different every time, and shapes
a ghostly faded permanence, like memory,
like what our hearts are steeped in.

India has a new post on her blog Not All Who Wander Are Lost about a project she did called The Colours of Home. It's not only an inspiring concept, it produced some wonderful fabrics. You can see them here

the gleam of light on water - 4th pause in Lent

2011-04-04T08:26:00.002+01:00

The theme for this Sunday in our church was light, or vision. It's a theme that matters a lot to me.

The 'gleam of light on water' is an ancient Celtic metaphor for a moment of delight, or enlightenment - a glimpse of the 'otherworld'. It's the metaphor I used to underpin Lúcháir, though I don't think the enlightened world is so very 'other'. As Christians we're supposed to believe in the resurrection of the body, not some disembodied etherial blissed out state of mind, which means there's a definite place in our spirituality for a deep love and commitment to the world we're in.

But we have to see it differently. See it as it is, not as we want it to be (or are afraid it might be). See it as a masterpiece of creation, not a snare or a delusion. And see every fact we can establish about it as a gift from God (so there's no room for pretending evolution didn't happen). It has been a tradition in my family, which is heavily biassed in favour of the sciences, that all truth leads to God. If you think there's a contradiction between faith and science, then you probably don't understand one or the other (and possibly both).

I was going to go on about this, but frankly the whole thing makes me cross. I know that people on both sides are just lining up along the party lines because they hate the other lot. I've heard Catholics sneer at the Big Bang theory, and I can see that if they realised that one of the leading scientists involved in discovering it was a Catholic, they'd change sides without breaking step. And some Protestant fundamentalists talking about the earth being 6000 years old, who would drop it like a hot potato if they knew that this calculation was made by a bishop (and well after the Bible was written!). And there are some atheists who find it hard to accept that any Christian can be a scientist at all.

Seeing with the eyes of faith doesn't involve switching your brain off. It involves switching your heart on. Then maybe we can hear the insights of people we don't agree with, and learn from them, without sacrificing our own integrity. And that would be a whole other world!

the territory of rain

2011-03-30T11:37:00.003+01:00

The rain got here! the garden definitely needed it, but I am so glad I took the chance to garden yesterday. I cleared the bit around the pond, to give a bit of breathing space to the yellow flag irises I grew from seed

and the woodland bed under the birch tree, getting rid of excessive aquilegias (it would break your heart to do it, as they are so lovely, but everything else needs room too! I also planted out some sweet violets here in the hope that they will produce more of the intensely purple - almost liquid in its depth - flowers and less leaves.

I forked over the herb patch and added some more sage and thymes, some st john's wort and some wood violets

and planted out a seedling fennel in the rose bed. I sowed three sorts of tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, carrots and beetroot, calabrese, courgettes, and rosemary seeds as an insurance, because my new bush that I planted this year looks as if it got walloped by the frost and it's struggling some. Finally I planted five root cuttings of comfrey. I could regret this - comfrey plants spread like mint - but they are so useful for providing liquid feeds for all those tomatoes, that it's worth it.

Oh, and I picked the first rhubarb, too.

Going Outward

2011-03-29T16:09:00.002+01:00

This is Brantwood, the setting for our Geopoetics conference "Going Outward" this weekend. It is a beautiful house, set in 250 acresof lovely Lakeland countryside and overlooking Coniston Water. It was the home of John Ruskin, and the setting for some of his experiments in farming and gardening, and where he spent years studying and drawingand encouraging local crafts and industries.

I hadn't known much about Ruskin apart from his art criticism, which established the reputation of Turner and inspired the Pre-Raphaelites, but it turned out there was a lot more to him than that. He was interested in education and social welfareand the environment, and the place of art and creativity in the lives of ordinary working people, not just a cultured elite. He was a competent but not a great artist, (which gave him a perceptive insight into the process of painting) and a serious geologist, not to mention a prolific writer.

The Brantwood Trust who own and manage the property now, continue his aims by managing the estate with a view to sustainable farming and conservation of habitat as well as making it pleasant and accessible for visitors. There is a gallery for local artists and they run courses in gardening, and drawing, and a very pleasant and comfortable venue for conferences like ours.

We learned about Ruskin and visited the garden - many of us took a walk around the estate, but I didn't, being defeated by the distances and the steep hills involved. I looked around the herb garden full of plants useful for dyeing and medicine and food and cosmetics, and watched the ducks on the lake and visited the house, which is kept very much as Ruskin left it.

We talked about the connections between Ruskin and geo-poetics, and between geo-poetics (and poetry in general) and film-making and watched some very stunning films. We had a social evening with poetry and singing and stories, and were introduced to the work of Mariusz Wilks (particularly his Journals of a White Sea-Wolf) a Polish Writer who practices geo-poetics in Russia, and heard poetry from England, Scotland, Wales, Poland and Venezuala. All in all, it was a great weekend - even the weather was lovely!

You can find out more about geopoetics here

Water - A (quick) Pause inLent

2011-03-28T09:50:00.003+01:00

The theme of readings for the 3rd week in Lent is water, which seems quite timely as I have been

noting World Water Day last Wednesday.
We are heading for a serious water crisis, not because there isn't going to be enough water, but because it's going to be
in the wrong places
polluted
salty
in short supply where we need it

We are draining the ground water very fast (60% of European cities are using up groundwater resources faster than they can be replenished - I got this figure off the New Civil Engineer, so you can bet that if they are worried, we should be).

We are creating deserts where fertile ground used to be by cutting down trees

We are creating serious floods by paving over ground which used to store water and release it into rivers gradually, or by building on flood plains

and of course,

We are melting the ice caps by excessive carbon emissions. It was also Climate Change week last week, and Earth Hour on Saturday.

Learning about the rock formations in my territory

and finding that a lot of my home landscape was created by water - the action of glaciers carving out valleys and depositing sedimentary rocks, and the inundation of the sea, which at one time used to come in as far as Aberfoyle.

Watching Richard Ashrowan's beautiful film 'Lament'

which features eddies in the River Tweed, at a geo-poetics Weekend at Brantwood House in the Lake District. This lead us to reflect on the transitory nature of human lives---

and
remembering as a counter-balance the passage in Psalm 1
where the man who ponders the law of the Lord is compared to
a tree that is planted
beside the flowing waters
that yields its fruit in due season
and whose leaves shall never fail

A Poetic Weekend

2011-03-22T10:55:00.002Z

On Saturday I went to St Andrews for the StAnza festival. Every year I say I should book early, and I should plan to stay over so I can get to the late night things, but always I forget, and I missed the Sorley Maclean events and seeing Billy Letford and so many more---

But St andrews is always fun. their idea of civil disobedience appears to be five pensioners tutting because the garden centre isn't open, and the Tesco express seems to think that students live on sprouting broccoli and organic pasta (not a sausage roll insight!). I think there were more lederhosen and grey floppy felt hats (a bit like Gandalf, only with blue and white cords around them) than I personally need to feel at home in a place, but the fish supper was the best I've ever had, much improved by the sight of the guy behind the counter prepping a lobster while I waited for my salt and vinegar on it!

I did get to the Anne Clarke reading, and Philip Gross and Selima Hill, and they were excellent events, but the really nice thing is to wander about and meet people and find out who has interesting things happening, and discover new things about poetry. Judy Williams (who was, just by chance in the seat next to me for the Selima Hill night) introduced me to the concept of the 'glosa' - a poetic form which expands and comments on already existing writing. It doesn't have to be another poem (at least not in my head; the classic version probably does) and I can see endless possibilities.

On Sunday I was at the Tower Mill in Hawick for an event organised by Eildon Tree, which was held over from the bad weather last December. It's a long haul to Hawick from here, but those Ettrick hills are the most beautiful I've ever seen. I kid you not, and I am married to a guy who is nuts about hills, so I've seen a fair few. It was much quieter than St Andrews, but there were some cracking readings (mostly short stories), and excellent music from four girls who called themselves Fiddling Chiks. Eildon Tree is a magazine which promotes new writing 'in the borders and beyond', and like Northwords Now it's free, but it's harder to come by as there isn't a web-site. I found it in the Scottish Poetry Library - well worth a look.

Mountain Moments - Second pause in Lent

2011-03-21T12:10:00.004Z

This distant mountain is Ben Ledi, the highest I can see from where I live. It's the motif for the second Sunday in Lent, because in our church we always read about the Transfiguration today.

Last year I think I talked about those moments of vision which sustain us when life gets bleak (which it did, as I remember, and still does). This year I want to move beyond the private and personal, into my life as a poet and as someone trying to live an environmentally responsible life.

Poetry - like religion, it seems to me - often gets stuck in a concern for private moments of illumination, as if they are the only things worth writing about - or worse, the only things worth living for. But this is to say that poetry, or religion is no more than self-indulgence. St Peter (who often gets put down for being impatient or overly self-assertive with his excited 'let's build three tents' outburst), is perhaps on the right track. The privileged moments aren't just to be savoured. They demand a response, a commitment. If we are lucky enough to live in a beautiful part of the world, then it isn't enough to be grateful and appreciate it. We must also cherish it, and be responsible for it. If we write poetry it isn't just about how lucky we are - it's also to share our vision with people, and enable them to cherish and share and speak up for their own visions.

As an environmentally conscious person, this last point is most important. It's easy for me, living in a fairly rural setting, to get excited about skylarks and buzzards and whooper swans, and as a person who isn't on the breadline, to ponder about where the most ethical food is going to come from - and I'm not going to apologise for it; those issues are important.

But some people don't have that luxury. Some people live in inner cities. Some people live alongside polluted rivers, depleted soil, or toxic emissions, or have to deal with failing monsoons, or catastrophhic weather systems. I get the feeling that a lot of green aspirations are romantic and nostalgic, or a fairly desperate longing for a new start. We can't do that. We have to say with Peter, "It is good for us to be here ".

I have become very enthusiastic about permaculture theory lately for many reasons - it is pro-diversity (including human, social and philosphical diversity), it is positive and hopeful, and it seems well grounded in understanding the earth and the way we are likely to behave. But one of the big things going for it is the way it is being used to revive degraded environments in the third world, after over-development or environmental disaster.

Here's a link to the Permaculture Portal, where you can read all about some of the good things that are happening all over the world. But best of all, ways to start here, where we are.

who are we without the land? a first pause in Lent

2011-03-13T10:45:00.003Z

Christianity gets a bad rep for being insensitive to the environment. It gets blamed for a dualistic soul/body, earth/heaven dichotomy in our thinking, which privileges the spirtual and the heavenly over the material and the here and now. That isn't Christianity, it's neoplatonism, but quite often you do find Christians who fit that stereotype, and I'd like to spend this Lent thinking about it.

The traditional Ash Wednesday injunction 'remember man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return' seems to have gone by the board these days - we just can't handle inclusive language in English and I do remember a priest saying he thought calling a woman 'woman' was quite rude (says it all, really) so he wouldn't do it. It's a shame, because it does highlight the fact that we are of the earth and have a responsibility to it.

I might talk about places where Christianity is a more rural phenomenon and redress a balance or two later on in Lent, but this week I want to consider something a bit more immediate. In this country Christianity (and especially Catholicism) has been a very urban experience - apart from in the Highlands and Islands, anyway. And with the exception of eg the Duke of Norfolk, it has been a poor people's experience. It's less so now, but we do keep what we call the preferential option for the poor, and this goes part way to explaining the lack of environmental awareness.

The poor don't own land. The poor don't have big gardens, can't buy smallholdings, or holiday cottages, and are finding it hard even to rent homes in the country. There's even competition for allotments.

What's worse, the poor have been removed from the land by industrialisation, high prices, war, emigration and several different kinds of chicanery from the enclosure of the common land to compulsory purchase. And there isn't much anyone can do about that now.

The Christian religion grew up among people who had been forcibly removed from the land. It was important that they developed a belief system which granted them dignity even without a home or a nation. They had to build new communities inspired by a God who cared for them even in the most radically deprived circumstances. It isn't surprising that some people began to feel that the land doesn't matter.

But this leaves people vulnerable. There are people who will use this attitude to justify stealing the land from under the feet of those who live there. Donald Trump, for instance, seems to feel that money can compensate for the loss of home and community any time he wants some. We only have to remember the outcry about the sale of forests in England to realise that this is a live issue. Land does matter. It has to be guarded, cherished. While we live, we are dependant on the land, and responsible for it.

But there is another point, and we have to make this clear too. There was a time when only landowners had the vote. They owned the land, they took care of it, they got to decide what was done with it, never mind what their tenants thought and felt about it. And this attitude hasn't gone away. Now the owners may not be wicked squires and landed gentry; they might be agri-businesses or insurance companies or even conservation groups. But they can't be allowed to behave as if the landless don't matter. The environmental shake-up that is on its way has got to work as much for the urban landless working classes as for the suburban gardeners and allotment-holders, the farmers and landed gentry.

The Living Landscape

2011-03-12T14:43:00.005Z

The Living Landscape:How to Read and Understand It By Patrick Whitefield

This is a fascinating book, which pretty much does what it says on the jacket. Patrick Whitefield is a man who knows his own territory intimately and understands the changes that have made it what it is today. In this book he looks at all sorts of landscape, mostly, but not exclusively, rural, and deals with everything from geology to land use and wildlife. It is easy to read, but very densely packed with information, maps, diagrams and colour photographs. It is published by Permanent Publications in conjunction with The Permaculture Association (Britain).

I read this last summer excited to discover how much it is possible to learn from observing the trees and plants and climate of a place, and this year I am reading it again, more slowly, and using it as a focus for my territory walks. By this time next year I hope I will have built up a good picture of the area I live in.

Area Profile
Location
A landscape shaped by the flows and falls and resting places of water, my territory is the flat land along the valley of the Forth.

It is surrounded by the Trossachs (highest Ben Vorlich 987m and Ben Ledi 879m) to the north,

the Ochils (highest Dumyat 418m) to the north and east, to the south west the Touch and Gargunnock Hills (highest Black Craig, 485m), and to the west, Flanders Moss.

The Valley opens out between the hills to the Carse of Stirling, once very wet and boggy, now drained for farming. The rock is red sandstone and the soil in our valley is silty gley, though largely fertile because the village has been cultivated so long, and some patches of very sticky clay.

The village itself grew up around the Abbey, which was famous for its orchards – only one of which survives. The River Teith flows into the Forth at Craigforth, to the north of the area.

The Forth itself winds and meanders and is tidal as far up as the old Stirling Bridge.

so whose is poetry anyway?

2011-03-07T14:41:00.003Z

We had a really good night at the Mitchell library last night - Glasgow is a city that really knows how to do libraries - a gorgeous big sandstone building, takes books seriously, sells books, good rooms for readings and other events, good toilets (ok, it's a middle-aged preoccupation, but our local library doesn't have a loo within 100 yards), has plenty of computers near the cafe where they don't bother the rest of us - and the cafe is brilliant too. Only downside is you meed a map and a guide, and possibly even a St Bernard with brandy to negotiate all those corridors, but the staff are that helpful I wouldn't be too sure they don't have one somewhere.

The evening was set up by the Scottish Writers Federation, and the organisation was immaculate. I notice that many poetry events these days are the same; I'm not sure if the flaky absent-minded poet stereotype is being de-bunked, or if it is accepted so completely that we overcompensate, but there are several business organisations that could learn a thing or two from the arts people!

There were thirty-five writers reading, and I was assured that access to the opportunity was completely open. Anyone who wanted to read got the chance, although latecomers had to go into a draw for the wild card slots. This meant much greater diversity than you get in a lot of readings - there were performance poets, page poets, novelists, first-timers, very experienced poets, young ones and pillars of the writing community.

Obviously the quality was variable. Obviously there were some poets who wouldn't get published in the TLS any time soon. And I've seen articles by prominent writers complaining that all this inclusivity is an insult to professionals who have spent years learning their craft, and is even demeaning to the whole of literature. I didn't like the sound of this at the time, and after last night I'm even surer that this is bull-dust.

Let's take quality first. If you put a lot of beginner poems alongside, say, Seamus Heaney (oops, my prejudices are showing here, but who's going to argue) it doesn't imply that one is as good as another. In fact it becomes obvious to anyone who gives a damn about poetry which is an achieved poem and which is a good attempt. And yes, I imagine there are 'poets' who will find this a kind of validation, tick the ambition off their life list, and dine out on it ever after, but they aren't really poets. They won't stick around because they'll be off after their next target, and small loss to the rest of us. Any beginner who actually cares about what they are doing will see perfectly that they have a long way to go. The accolade of being included isn't a reward, it's permission to roll up their sleeves and start work. And we live in a culture where many people feel the need for that permission. To deprive them of it is simply mean-spirited.

But there's also something more basic at stake. If poetry is reduced to an academic discipline, requiring years of training, then it becomes an unsustainable luxury, like grand opera. And if there isn't corporate sponsorship (with the creation of spectacular events so the corporate can do their entertaining) then pretty soon it's just fiddling while the Big Society burns, and then there won't be any poetry. And who would miss it?

Last night showed another perspective. There was a lot of very accomplished poetry, and I've noted a few names to look out for in future. But some of the least developed stuff was potentially the most important. I don't know what you called it, George McEwan, but the Ballad of Reid and Airlie ought to be up there with the Freedom Comeallye. People wrote about some of the most important issues of their lives - sometimes personal, sometimes political. People used poetry to get to grips with family issues, personal events, community and historical perspectives. It went beyond 'self-expression'; it wasn't just a licence to let off steam about stuff. It was the genuine voice of a community.

Poetry needs this. If poetry loses touch with this, it will deserve to disappear.

February in the garden

2011-03-03T11:22:00.008Z

We had such nice weather last weekend. The crocuses seemed to appear from nowhere,

the snowdrops were in full flower, and all the birds seem to be manically nesting. The shyer ones who came in during the cold weather seem to have gone back to quiter country, but there are sparrows, dunnocks, all kinds of tits, robins and blackbirds setting up their territories.

And I am setting up mine.The early potatoes are in, seeds are happening,

and I'm planting soft fruit bushes, like the redcurrant above, and the gooseberry below.

At my desk, I've updated the burnedthumb web-site, and written a few wintry poems.
On Sunday I will be reading at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow -gorgeous sandstone building. You can find out about this event, organised by the Scottish Federation of Writers, here

Resilience building 2

2011-02-27T09:40:00.004Z

Back in the autumn, I posted about building resilience. I think you'll notice that my proof-reading on that occasion was not up to much! Since then we've had the longest and worst winter of recent years, and I got the chance to test just how resilient I really was. Not so much, as it turned out!

The thing is, is isn't just about Being Prepared. Yes, we were caught on the hop because the frost came so early - the garlic only went in last week, and I'm reliably informed that this means it will all run to seed, and I might as well not have bothered. The answer for next year is to plant them in pots. But that means having potting compost, but I didn't and the chances of getting to a garden centre in all that ice were something less than zero. Something else to be prepared for this year!

The thing is that our definition of being prepared has to change. We are used to 'just in time' ordering, so we're not stockpiling stuff like our grannies, and therefore having to create storage space, which we have to maintain and service. But just in time ordering doesn't mean less waste, it just pushes the waste down the line, so ther people have to stockpile, and deliver the small loads we need, or else we have to make extra trips, and so on - and, as we all found out, it makes the supply lines very vulnerable. If you could get to the shops the shops didn't have the stock, and if you were snowed in and ordered on line, the deliveries couldn't get through.

The other vulnerability I found was the domino effect. If I planned to do one thing, and if failed, or took longer I couldn't get to the next thing because it depended on having done the first - and so on through the day. Not only did I have a whole complex of jobs not done, but I was completely frazzled and frustrated, and frankly miserable.

A neat, sleek, efficient programme with all your tasks batched and your gaps time designated looks like a work of art on paper. And I've had a life full of distractions and derailments - you have no idea how satisfying it is to look at a plan for a week that is consistent and productive and creative after so many years being on call for everybody else. But it is a recipe for disaster.

A resilient system has to be resilient all along the line. We have to wire our systems in parallel, not in series. There's a downside to this - complexity.

Instead of getting all your stuff from one source (shopping, energy, water, employment) which will give you a good deal in return for commitment, we are going to have to mix and match. We're going to have to stop looking for 'magic bullet' solutions, too. No pesticides that wipe out everything that bothers us. We will have to learn to live with a predictable and manageable level of damage with the trade-off that it's better for all the other species on the planet, not just us. We will have to have power from a mix of different sources, with the trade-off that we'll never have to be totally without, even if it's less than we want.

But the big trade-off is that it sparks creativity. And creativiity is the happiest experience than a human being can have in this life. A happy harmonious planet makes for happy harmonious people. As without, so within.

2011-02-22T10:19:00.002Z

Burned Thumb
The holy grail, distilled wisdom
of all the world, slips sideways
through the fingers of authority.
Never mind the years of waiting,
the great fish caught and gutted,
the dragon trapped in the pit,
the long simmered broth of herbs,
it always goes astray. The poet
is always that chance apprentice
sucking his clumsy thumb,
scarred, accidental, listening.

As Without So Within

2011-02-20T16:01:00.002Z

Astrologers have a saying "as above so below", meaning that what goes on in the sky is reflected in what goes on down here. Now I'm not big on astrology, being a fairly rational kind of person (but we'll get to the faith vs science bit next week), but one thing I have discovered.

Whatever goes on inside ourselves is reflected in the outside world. And this is crucially important just now.

We are undoubtedly up against it, not only in this country (recession, bankers, Tories, spending cuts, petrol prices, food prices, pensions, social services, just give DC a horned helmet and call him Attila) but as a species, as a planet. Loss of biodiversity is the biggest threat to planetary survival at this time, and the biggest threat to biodiversity is climate change. We really are all in this together. It's time for radical action.

And yet. One of the biggest planks in my lúcháir project strategy is stress reduction. Meditation. Down-time. Chilling and living in the moment. Why? Because 'as within, so without'.

Why do we over-consume? Anxiety. We comfort shop. We defend ourselves with stock-piles of stuff we don't need 'just in case'. We feel we have to have our own stuff rather than borrowing because we are too uptight to lend or borrow comfortable. We have to have our own space because we get anxious being too involved with other people. We are security nuts (though this is a bad time to talk about security the week after almost all the sheds in the village were broken into. They didn't touch ours although it would have been dead easy, and they didn't seem to take anything but garden tools which was all they'd have got anyway). Everything from burglar alarms to nuclear weapons is a stress-related purchase.

We also make foolish, short-term and irrational decisions under stress, which inevitably leads to waste and inefficiency. And we fall down on our good resolutions, and then have to cheer ourselves up and start all over again. A stressed person is not only ineffective, but despondent, resentful, self-pitying, and frankly no fun.

If we are really going to tackle the enormous problems of the way we live, we are going to have to start with a bit of useless, self-indulgent navel-gazing. We need to be job fit. And that doesn't include guilt trips, bullying, or self-righteousness. Just chill for a bit, and we can start fair.

A River of Stones

2011-02-18T12:10:00.002Z

I just heard that one of my 'small stones' from January will be in the forthcoming anthology. It was this one

Penguin Book of Irish Poetry edited by Patrick Crotty

2011-02-18T09:58:00.002Z

I set myself a reading challenge this year, to read three anthologies, of Irish poetry, American women poets and Chinese Rivers and Mountains poetry. And to back this up, I've chosen three individual poets, Neruda, Cavafy and Basho - partlybecause I like them so much, partly because their poetry is very different from mine. I needed to shake things up a little.

I've just finished the first book, and here it is.

This is a big book - family Bible sized at least, and in my house I'm not sure that it isn't going to get chained to something, as Bibles sometimes were, to make sure it stays where I can get it. It's a tremendous resource, covering in great depth about fifteen centuries of Irish poetry both in Irish and in English. There was stuff here I knew and loved - and sometimes in new translations that wake me up to things I hadn't seen before, stuff I knew about but hadn't been able to track down, and a lot of stuff, particularly the later medieval poetry and the poetry of the nineteenth and early twentieth century that I didn't know existed. Real treasures.

It revised a lot of things I thought I knew about Ireland, both wiser, more light-hearted, more cosmopolitan than the stereotype, but also sometimes darker and more cruel. Patrick McDonagh's O Come to the Land captures the ambivalence of the whole collection as he balances a an overt expression of kindliness hospitatlity and culture, with a hidden experience of poverty, repression and callousness. Religion is a repository of wisdom, security and compassion but also sometimes an instrument of torment. Women are sometimes powerful, hard-working, outspoken, frankly sexual, sometimes aloof passive dream-figures, sometimes treated with contempt. They get more of a showing in this volume throught the ages than they would in a similar collection of English verse.

Best of all, Patrick Crotty includes songs and ballads alongside the poems, so we get Patrick Kavanagh's On Raglan Road and Christy Moore's Lisdoonvarna as well as Yeats' predictable Salley Gardens. (and McBreen's Heifer and Slathery's Mounted Fut by Percy French which were part of my childhood. I don't really see much of a gap between poetry and song myself, and I think the closeness and connection is a big strength of Scottish poetry as well as Irish. It certainly brings a lot to this book.

Brides Chickens

2011-02-14T10:54:00.002Z

Harbingers of spring,
the sound of oystercatchers
whistling in the dark.

We went up to the university last night to see Chico and Rita (not as good as the hype - showing nudity and drug-taking doesn't make animation 'adult'), and as we left the car park the air was full of the whistling of returning oyster-catchers. They nest on the flat roofs during the spring and they are incredibly noisy, especially at night. In gaelic the are known as ghille-bridhe (the servants of Bridget) because they usually arrive round about her feast day, which is why they are also called Bride's chickens.

As Above So Below

2011-02-11T11:50:00.002Z

The cloud on the hill drifts down
to meet the damp green on the grass
the wet tarmac, disintegrating leaves
despondent gardens

First day of real gardening

2011-02-08T10:27:00.002Z

The weather was so nice at the weekend. I got all the pots tidied up

and on Sunday we went to buy potting compost, - and a few other things---

and today was going to be the day when things got moving. I was going to plant the witch hazel and the aconites, set out the garlic I bought back in November just before the frost and snow, and maybe start some early potatoes in the greenhouse.
I was defeated by the frost last night - not a very hard one, but enough to persuade me that it wasn't a good time to take risks. I did get some clearing up done, however, and in the course of it I found that some things have already heard the starting whistle:

These bright red shoots are elecampane. It will get to over six feet high and have bright yellow flowers like disshevelled daisies in the summer.Basically it is an aspirational dandelion, but it's cheerful and easy - and look at that red! I found it growing wild near the ruins of St Brendan's monastery on Eilach a Naoimh once, cut very short by the winds; it may have been deliberately planted, as it had some herbal value - the roots were used for cough cures.

I'm really thrilled to find this pot looking so lively. The bright green leaves are hyssop, a mediterranean herb which really doesn't like damp and which has failed me several years in the ground. The cold this winter doesn't seem to have been nearly such a big problem as sitting about in mild wet soil in previous years.

Of Gods and Men directed by Xavier Beauvois

2011-02-04T11:38:00.004Z

I went to see the film Of Gods and Men last night. Chretien de Chergé has been one of my heroes since his Testament was published. I'd put a link to this remarkable document except that it's only available in French, for some reason I don't understand!

The film reminded me of the gentle charming Etre et Avoir in its quiet fragmentary build-up of the relations between characters but the themes are so much darker. The monks of the Atlas Mountain monastery are caught between the violence of terrorists and the aggression of the army - and to this day no-one knows for certain which side killed them.

Dome Donald McGlynn of Nunraw Abbey tells the full story here. he was responsible for publishing a lot of the background information about the monastery, and it was noticeable how close the film kept to this material.

The other thing I noticed about the film was its restraint. There was no taking of sides. There was no glossing over the divisions between the monks as life got more dangerous. They were shown as well-meaning, but not too wise, brave, but not noble, good but perhaps not always right. There was very little violence. There was no way of identifying the killers, whose faces were alwys in shadow. And at the end we did not see the deaths. Monks and kidnappers quietly disappeared into the snow.

Two shots will always stand out for me. One is the taking of a photograph in the last peaceful days before the end. All the monks are standing together in the sunshine, smiling. I have a copy of the real photo on prayer cards -it is so close to that shot. It must have been a labour of love. And the other is when the monks are singing an Easter litugy, almost but not quite drowned out by the sound of the helicopter above. Gradually the brothers come together, their arms around each other, proclaiming the persistence of light and hope.

Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. Sometimes the way we defend ourselves is more dangerous than the gullibility of being trusting and compassionate.

Yesterday on Facebook the poet Andrew Philip posted this
picture of Christians protecting Muslims at prayer in Liberation Square in Egypt, and reminded us that at Christmas there were Muslims protecting Christian churches during the services. It's important to realise that this can happen, the value of honouring other people's beliefs whether we share them or not.

As for the rest of us, we stumble and get up again, stumble and get up again. And learn to forgive ourselves and each other, every time.

New month, new season

2011-02-03T10:02:00.002Z

This was Tuesday. look at it, all new buds and promises

The jasmine on the yard had another go at flowering -

the pond had no ice for the first time in over two months

But this morning it was snowing again. There's not much at this level, and what there is, is melting fast, but the hills are all outlined in white again, and up north the traffic is having a hard time.

By the river things are looking battered and bleak.

It will take a week or two for the new growth to green up. But there's something in the air. The migrating birds are beginning to get restless and there was a blackbird near the top of a sapling rowan tuning up for the coming spring.

Slokt by Sea by Nalini Paul

2011-02-01T15:36:00.002Z

Slokt by Sea was also launched by Red Squirrel on 17th January. It grew out of nalini Paul's year in residence in Orkney as George Mackay Brown Writing Fellow. It's a quiet book, a bit disenegaged for my taste at the moment, but full of good things.The word 'slokt' means drenched, or quenched, and the book is thoroughly soaked in Nalini Paul's engagement with the sea, from a first encounter with high water crossing the Churchill barriers to a distant view of the Old Man of Hoy. It is full of music Lark Ascending, Danse Macabre and traditional Orkney fiddle music, and haunted by the legendary selkies - the seal-people, human on land and seal in the sea.

She is very conscious of landscape and weather. There is rain:
Sheets of rain sweep over the streets
against flats
into gutters
saturating leaves

and wind, peat and birds. I love her snapshot of gannets off Lerwick;

scissors fold shut
before the plunge

and the night sky:

a bowl of hidden stars

and the way she uses colours and textures, as in the first poem Moth, or in Sunshine in the Hope. I hope there are more Orkney poems to come.

Defragmenting Sappho by Kevin Cadwallender

2011-02-01T15:09:00.003Z

It's two weeks since Red Squirrel launched Kevin Cadwallender's new book, Defragmenting Sappho so it's more than time I reviewed it, especially since I had it read by the time I got home that night.

Kevin is known for his excellent performance poetry, very funny, very well-performed, but also thought-provoking and extremely intelligent. And though the launch was also a brilliant performance, with music and readings by fellow-poet Sophia Walker, no-one was really ready for the new departure this book is.

Essentially Kevin Cadwallender has reconstructed poems from the fragments which are all we have from the 7th century BC poet Sappho. He studied them intensely in the translations of Anne carson, deliberately restricting his vocabulary to what is known of hers, and producing sixty new composite poems.

The result is passionate, tender, lyrical. Sappho praises, teases, reproaches, remembers lost loves, entices new ones, confronts old age, infidelity and mortality

Someone will remember us, I say,
even in another time
when our bones are whiter than an egg (58).
Sometimes there is a lot to work with - as in the above example. Occasionally there is very little:
Sunset stoops over the hill
slowly like an old man
putting out fire.

(the italicised words are Sappho's)

It is moving, astonishing, a little bit obsessive. It's brilliant.

River of Stones 31

2011-01-31T09:21:00.002Z

And the last one -

Nine swans in a line
flying north from orchard to river
in a fanfare of white wings

River of Stones 30

2011-01-31T09:19:00.001Z

Missed two, what with birthday shenanigans and all, but here goes for the last two:

After each frost the winter jasmine
puts out new candles of yellow flower.

happy birthday

2011-01-30T10:11:00.003Z

Lovely grand-daughter came over yesterday dressed as Snow-White, to help me open my birthday cards. I was immensely proud to see she had signed hersherself - it included a Peppa Pig badge, which I will be wearing!

Then she said "You need a cake. You can't make your own birthday cake, I have to make it for you" And she did (with help). Pink icing and all the sprinkles in the kitchen.

Best birthday ever!

2011-01-28T11:51:00.003Z

This is the view out over the Carse from the castle. I was trying to get our abbey in, but I don't think you can make it out. I think it was new year when I took this picture, but not much has changed since then, although the snow has gone from all but the most sheltered corries on the Ochils. There is still ice on the pond and the garden ground is too hard for gardening, though I may be able to clean the greenhouse and the cold frame over the weekend. And then I can tink about sowing the very first half-hardy annuals, and the year will begin.

The River of Stones project is coming to an end, and it will run again in July. It has been very good for making me write down the things I'm noticing on the garden and along the river; I'll be keeping it up, at least in my notebooks, and now the light is getting better there should be more photos to go with them. I am stacking up new books to mention, too - Defragmenting Sappho by Kevin Cadwallender, a new departure for him, and Slokt by Sea by Nalini Paul, which I hope to review next week.

And meanwhile, the MS of Wherever We Live Now has been sent off and I'm beginning to look beyond it for new poems. Lots of ice poems so far, and a fair bit of mortality and mythology, and music too I hope. It's going to be a busy year.

River of Stones 27

2011-01-28T11:50:00.001Z

Pink orchid flowers
tethered to a bare dry stem.

River of Stones 26

2011-01-27T12:10:00.000Z

Crocus stems between
autumn's leaves still lying

River of Stones 25

2011-01-26T15:04:00.000Z

A guitar that sings like a sax
a voice that plays like a cello.

Richard Thompson rocks, frankly!

River of Stones 24

2011-01-25T07:58:00.001Z

Against a brightening sky
a grimy thumb-print of cloud
smudged along the top of the hill.

River of Stones 23

2011-01-23T15:09:00.000Z

First day after the frost.
The gardeners are out already.

River of Stones 22

2011-01-23T15:08:00.002Z

Starlings hang out
on high branches of the beech tree
talking of moving on
feeling the tug of north.

River of Stones 21

2011-01-21T11:19:00.001Z

This is one I didn't see, but was told about. I couldn't resist it!

Immaculate in white,
her three-quarter-length trousers
and neon pink high heels
are perfectly chosen to set off
the tag on her ankle.

River of Stones 20

2011-01-21T11:17:00.001Z

A moss hedgehog
unfurls frost-bristles.

Time is catching up with me - this is a day late!