StAnza Spring and Other Such Commotions

Back in January, I booked my tickets for the big events at StAnza, only to discover, three days later, that the Byre Theatre had gone into administration, and would close at once. What heroic efforts took place behind the scenes I do not know, but thanks to the team lead by Eleanor Livingstone - including many of the Byre staff who lent their help voluntarily to sort things out, Scotland's premier poetry festival went off without a hitch. I was there for two and a half days, long enough to hear Gillian Clarke talk about the Goddodin and give an excellent reading, Tessa Ransford and Iyad Hayatleh read and talk about their collaboration The Rug of a Thousand Colours, a furiously and filthily witty re-enactment of The Flyting of Kennedy and Dunbar, performance poetry by Rachel McCrum and Harry Giles, and an excellent discussion about engaging with nature at Saturday's Poetry Breakfast. These Poetry Cafe events are a fabulous idea, as the meat pies at lunch time and the danish pastries at breakfast are superb, and if I hadn't had the world's biggest breakfast at my digs, I'd have really gone for it. Add to this, a fish supper from the superb Tail End takeaway,some fortuitous book buying (including The Triumph Tree edited by Thomas Clancy, which I got on a hint from Gillian Clarke's lecture), a long session with my fellow-judge Anne Connolly working on the Red Squirrel competition, and the quiet open mike run by Jim Carruth, and you can see that a great time was had. I met old friends and made some new ones, and even bought a dress I've had my eye on in the Ness sale. You can read more about StAnza on The StAnza Blog - and mark 5th-9th March 2014 in your diaries, because that's when the next one is happening.

Meanwhile, the house is now more or less sorted out, and all the things set aside to go to charity shops have in fact gone. We still have two crates of books I don't quite know what to do with (yes, I am going to keep them!)and a whole lot of cartons that we can't get rid of because we'll need them when youger daughter moves out, but we can at least use all the house now without shifting a ton of stuff first, and we are all settling down quite comfortably.We have just heard that our newest grandchild - due in the summer - will be a girl, and Lucy read me the whole of Cinderella this morning and then said "You bring me one of your books, one with colourful pictures in, and I'll have a bash at it!"

Meanwhile spring is happening. In the garden the first flowers are coming through:

The weather has been so dry lately that the river has been very low at low tide and very still at high tide. There are a lot of ducks here just now, goosanders and goldeneye, mallards and little grebes, and even a moorhen, which I haven't seen for a while. The best sight of all, though, was the otter. Forget shy and elusive, forget the state of the tide, this character was swimming about in broad daylight in the middle of the afternoon, just above our bridge where everyone stopped to look. I think the river must be in better health than I had imagined!

All the ducks are paired now, the black-headed gulls have their summer plumage, and the chaffinches and blue tits seem suddenly much brighter and more colourful. Magpies and blackbirds are obviously building nests and robins and wrens are visibly competitive. Birdsong in the early morning is louder and more various, and last week I heard the first song thrush. Even the snow and hard frost doesn't seem to have slowed them down. There are catkins on the hazels and sallows and daisies in the grass. Let the weather do as it likes, everything else knows it's spring!

the Week of New Leaves in the Territory of Rain

I didn't get out and about much last week, what with the showers and with not being very well.

While I was in the house, out in the territory, spring was getting busy. Almost all the trees are in leaf, that burning intense green (with undernotes of copper and yellow) that is almost a cure for all ills by itself. Only the ash and the beech are still lagging, and there are flower buds on the rowan and hawthorn and elder. This flower

makes its presence felt more and more along the river banks as well as in our pond, and the tulips are at their elegant best.

There's less success among the vegetables. There are shoots of early peas and potatoes, but there's no sign of carrts or beetroot, and the salads were no sooner up than they were eaten. There are birds nesting in all the hedges and shrubs, and while the blackbirds are sitting on eggs, the sparrows are feeding their first broods.

This last photo is one I took in our local Waterstones. Loads of people I know have gone in to see it really sitting there - between Rimbaud and Scott - so I hope someone buys it to make it worth the shop's while!

The Week of the Butterflies in the Territory of Rain

This was a bad week for somewhere called the territory of rain. There hasn't been any for days, and in fact the sun has shone solidly. To be short, the spring has been wonderful! There are celandines

and cuckoo-flowers

We are having the first rhubarb in a crumble for dinner tonight, and there is blossom on the gooseberry bush.

The pear and plum blossom in the orchard is much more spectacular, but as it isn't my orchard, and in fact there are two other gardens between my desk and the view, so there won't be any pictures. It's what the more pretentious gardening books call borrowed landscape, but it is the only remaining remnant of the orchards for which our Abbey was famous, so I treasure it - and write about it rather a lot.

There are bees everywhere so the harvest should be wonderful, and the tadoles in the pond are hatching. I'm learning to identify individual bird songs in the racket in the garden - so far I can do blackbird, starling, thrush, robin, chaffinch, dunnock, wren, sparrow, blue tit and great tit - plus the obvious divas like oyster-catcher, curlew and skylark. And now I've listed them, I'm kind of impressed - it looks like a lot more than I thought!

But this week belongs to the butterflies. On Monday there was a peacock battering against my window, then two more feeding on the dandelions, and cabbage whites on the alkanet, and a tortoiseshell sunning itself on a neighbour's roof. This seems awfully early in the year. There's a ghost of a poem in the back of my pay saying "We'll pay for it, we'll pay for it, we'll pay for it!".

This Week in the Territory of Rain - Equinox

Winter is over and summer is come
and the sound of the lawn-mower is heard in the land.

I caught a glimpse of a blackbird hen trying to get about three feet of grass stem into the hedge this week. I am fairly certain there is a dunnock nesting there, as well as a colony of sparrows, and a robin is using the birch and the rowan as song-posts, so the nesting season is under way.

Plants in the woodland garden are bulking up nicely, and the first honesty is in bloom. Flowers are a big deal just now, as the bumblebees have been emerging from hibernation. The crucuses were all early, but the daffodils are late, or coming up blind, so I will have to think of some more early flowers to increase the pollen supplies.

The garden has been quite noisy, as, along with the birds and the bees, the frogs have been at it too. There's quite a lot of frogspawn this year, so I hope there will be no sharp frosts.

The last two days have been grey, fairly cool, and misty. As we came home from our daughter last night the mist was condensing on the tree branches and dripping like rain. Shrubs like honeysuckle, tutsan and fruit bushes are in their first leaf, and the early trees are just at bud burst.

Advance and Retire

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!

First Steps in January

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