The Week that Kindled Autumn

Abbey Craig

High on the grey rock
autumn lights a burning torch
oak among alders.

It's like watching a slow fire from my window. The beeches are turning coppery, the birch yellow, the maples red and the sycamores every shade of flame from sepia to bronze. Bringing Lucy home from school is complicated by leaf scuffling and walks 'in the forest' - the avenues of lime and cherry trees that were planted on the river bank only thirty-five years ago, but which have always been part of my acquaintance with the territory of rain.

On Sunday we went further afield, to Aberfoyle, where we saw this amazing stagshorn fungus. We go there often, and I've written three poems about it, for spring, summer and autumn.

Naming the Autumn

A mite in the hills' green folds,
I walk, naming the autumn –
coal tit, oakmoss, bracket fungus.
I mark the whiskered outgrowths
of blaeberries and whin, and hollows
where primroses will flavour spring
with sunlight and honey. I know
which woods are good for burning
and where the Highland fault line cuts
the ancient metamorphic rock
from fertile sandstones in the south.
A net of sweeping birch twigs sifts
the wind, and catches strands of lichen,
ice-green and hairy. Taxonomy
fails me. I cannot bring to mind
its name, or whether it’s the sort
I need to make a winter pot-pourri.
No matter. The art of knowing
is knowing when to let things be.

Now I feel I should do one for winter!I can't say I like it so much since they put in the zipline, but it's hard to grudge people an experience that they obviously enjoy so much.

One new thing I do like, however, is the wildlife hide, where we saw this irresistibly cute resident.

I am glad to know that the squirrel and bird populations are going to be supported this year, because I've been shocked to see how few berries and acorns there are. Last year, I know, was a 'mast year' when trees bear heavily, so I expected a certain falling off, but the weather has been so poor that wildlife is going to struggle if we don't help. The good people at the Loch of the Lowes were only saying yesterday how many underweight hedgehogs they've seen, so the plan Lucy and I have made for a hedgehog house looks very timely!

Can I just give a last call for submissions fro the Stravaig magazine? We'd like artwork or filmclips as well as poetry or essays if anyone has them, on the theme of 'coast to coast'. Submissions to burnedthumb@gmail.com, please, by 1st November.

The Book is Launched

I

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!