The brilliant poet Nalini Paul is organising a weekend residential writing retreat on the island of Westray - which sounds like a fabulous combination to me! The cost is £250 all-inclusive, per person, covering accommodation, meals and workshops. See http://www.facebook.com/l/951874IKeACX3FilaFFoyG9VgRQ;www.westmanse.co.uk/whats-on-at-the-manse.php and click on "What's on at the Manse" for more information.

Wittins Sheena Blackhall

This lovely book was launched at the Callander Poetry Weekend, one of the Die-Hard Metallic series. It is a collection of the recent poems of the terrifyingly prolific Sheena Blackhall - she produced a whole pamphlet of childrens' verse on a flight to Vietnam for a wedding - and includes poems in Doric and English, poems written in song and in ballad form as well as in less structured forms, poems about animals, landscape, language and poetry and a lot of poems about death. Death is the big topic this year and almost everyone at Callendar had at least one poem about it.

Sheena's poetry is both lively and thoughtful, profoundly reflective, lyrical and comic. And sometimes all in the one poem. She is hard to categorise - and would resent the effort to do it, as the witty New Cottage Industry points out. She us popular and accessible; her pamphlet The Win and the Rain which was written for the Tsunami appeal in Aberdeen, sold out completely. But there is nothing superficial or ephemeral about it. A poem from it, The Birth of Death is included in this collection, and still moves even after other catastrophes have pushed the Tsunami out of the headlines.

The picture below shows two of my favourite poems, but it also shows one of the features of the Metallic design - the 'trip to Jerusalem ' binding which allows the book to open flat. The publisher Ian King gave us a demonstration of this process, pointing out that it was cheap and easy, and if you can make your own books, no-one can stop you writing what you like. But I'm afraid the longer he talked, the more convinced I became that it is actually very difficult, highly skilled work requiring a more than the average amount of dexterity, dedication and good judgement, and will not be attempted by me any time soon.

Wherever We Live Now

Yesterday's post was, quite rightly, all about Sally and the other stellar poets at the Callander festival. However, I have some news of my own that I am just busting to tell.

My first collection, working title Wherever We Live Now, has been accepted by Red Squirrel Press and will come out about this time next year. Here you can see what I wrote about the wonder of nature (no, I hadn't submitted by then!)that is Sheila Wakefield. I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be working with her and joining the line-up of marvellous poets she publishes - Eleanor Livingstone, Nalini Paul, Colin Will, Kevin Cadwallender, Colin Donati, Andy Jackson ---

I could go on, but even after four days I'm too excited to concentrate. I'd forget someone wonderful and be mortified.

All I can say is, watch this space.

Callander Poetry Weekend

Englyn for Sally

In her cave of books, she guards the words,
Sorts trinkets from treasure.
There is fire in her belly,
And strength in her outspread wings.

I wrote this ages ago, when I first got to know Sally Evans, editor of Poetry Scotland and the Die-Hard Press, (which she runs with her husband, Ian King), and thought that, because of her name, she must be Welsh. She is, but not quite as much as I thought. Although of Welsh heritage, she was actually brought up in Northumbria.But this year she has been learning Welsh, and here she is, reading poems inspired by it.

Never was this englyn more appropriate than this weekend, when, as she does every year, she organises her Callander Poetry Weekend. Originally meant as an extended party for her Edinburgh friends who didn't drop in quite so much when she and Ian moved to callander, it retains the friendliness, the hospitality and the illusion that it's all easy and comes without effort. But it's also an open house for poets of all kinds and types and classifications of poets, to read and meet up and find out what's going on in poetry in Scotland - and further afield.

There are young poets, just getting started. There are older poets with years of successful publication behind them. There are mystical poets, political poets, love poets, green poets, lyrical poets, satirical and historical poets - some fabulous performance poets - and some really good musicians too. There are poets who write in Gaelic, in Doric or in the many dialects of Britain (and if you think dialect = comic you would be only half wrong as we had some excellent comic poetry written in dialect).

There were really good food, workshops (can't comment, mine was one of them!) two book launches, (Charlie Gracie's Good Morning, which I featured back in May and Sheena Blackhall's Wittins, which I'll write about later this month), and a tribute to Edwin Morgan, which everyone who was there found moving and appropriate for Scotland's well loved makar.

Now, as well as organising and programming the many events packed into the weekend, Sally also cooks the food for everyone (and doesn't charge), puts people up in her flat or in her garden, helps people find lifts home or places to stay, provides stalls for poets and other publishers to sell their books, and shares her lovely home and shop and garden with everyone who comes. It's a mammoth job. What's more, this year she did it, as she says, "with one hand tied behind my back", because of a broken wrist which was in plaster until last Monday.

Sally, we couldn't possibly tell you how much we loved this year's festival, or how grateful and appreciative we are for all you do for Scottish poetry. Thank you so much!

Callander Poetry Weekend

The programme for the hospitable and poetically diverse festival of them all, Sally Evans' Poetry in the Garden weekend,(3rd-5th September, Callander Bookshop, Main Street) is up on her website desktopsallye.com. In spite of having broken a wrist, Sally has put together something very special; if you can get to it at all, I really recommend it.

Of course it doesn't hurt that I'm reading on the Friday night, and leading a workshop on the Scottish/Irish (and Welsh) poetry connection. But there are too many other excellent poets reading all through the weekend for me to single any out. Go look!

Poetry News

Things have been quiet here lately, while my life got busy elsewhere, but they should be stepping up a bit soon.

My poem Word to Sign:Translating Swallows appeared in Poetry Scotland earlier in the summer, Granary Cottage will be in the next Gutter and two poems, The Thaw and Slate Island Landscape will be in the issue of Brittle Star which comes out in November.

Meanwhile in September, Sally Evans will be holding the Poetry in the Garden weekend from the 3rd to the 5th, and I will be leading a workshop on the poetic connections between Scotland and Ireland. It's a subject I was very excited about, and I was even more excited when I found that the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre in Northern Ireland had led the way, so I found even more interesting leads to follow up.

Songs the Lightning Sang Geoff Cooper; Folklore Tim Atkins

Sometimes you read good poetry that is familiar, that reads like the sort of poem you would write yourself if you were good enough, the sort of poem you want to write when you grow up. And sometimes you come across good poetry of a sort you never even thought of, and that you wouldn't ever be able to write unless you rewired your brain, that astonishes you with newness and strangeness - and occasionally makes you ask yourself if what you write is poetry at all.

After today's lot, I began to see myself as a slightly manic four year old, jumping up and down with excitement shouting "Wow, look at that! It's so pretty!"

Poets of the first sort are easy to find if you like poetry at all. They include, for me, Kathleen Jamie, Gillian Clarke, Seamus Heaney and John Burnside, Eavan Boland (might as well aim high while you're at it!) Poets of the second sort are rarer, and more tricky. Recently I've been reading two such - Geoff Cooper whose Songs the Lightning Sang was brought out by Calderwood Press earlier this year and Tim Atkins, whose Folklore is published by Salt.

Geoff Cooper's poetry is unashamedly Romantic, obviously influenced by Coleridge, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Neruda, but achieving a voice of his own by tempering the lushness with accurate observation of the natural world and careful control of metre and structure. It is sensual poetry, inspired by landscapes, painting and music, passionate, as becomes a first collection, but also powerful and mature. It depicts a beautiful but fragile world where human behaviour is largely destructive or violent, God absent, nature indifferent. Yet the pervading sense of alienation and despair is not the final word.
I remembered
as a fool remember, that poetry must go beyond
the shining world ---
---brave and deep
inside others, and beyond ourselves.
must puzzle out
what's furthest, hardest,
yes poetry must seek out

All those other human worlds

Tim Atkins' poetry is not much like that at all. For him the distinction of the individual human worlds much less that between the natural and human world doesn't seem to exist. It's even hard to make out what the subjects of his fractured sentences are. The whole landscape,(Atkins is inspired by the Malvern Hills, the setting for The Vision of Piers Plowman) stones, people, flowers, stars, bones, birds, comes together to make one living breathing fertile mortal organism. You know what you are up against when he starts with
Man walks into sky .

It is physical, but not exclusively visual poetry, tactile, auditory, richly textured. Weird and beautiful.