Poems from the Backroom: Gerry McGrath

One lesson of the #plagueopoems is that Scotland seems jam packed with poets. There are loud poets and there are douce poets, poets who have a big social media presence and poets who just work at writing poetry.  I think Gerry McGrath is an example of an outstanding poet who just gets on with stuff and leaves the shouting about it to others. There are others, Angus Martin for instance, who let the poems do the talking. Poems often talk quietly, however, it is their persistent power, so Gerry is not as weel kent as he should be, despite his impressive body of work.

Gerry McGrath was born and raised in Helensburgh, Scotland. He attended Strathclyde and Glasgow universities in the 1980s and worked for several years as a teacher before quitting for reasons of ill health in 2000. To date, he has published two full collections of poetry, both by the ever impressive Carcanet, 'A to B' published in 2008 and 'Rooster' four years afterwards, which was shortlisted for the Scottish Book of the Year in 2013. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including 'Being Alive' from Bloodaxe and 'New Poetries IV' from Carcanet, 2007. His reviews (mainly of contemporary poetry in translation) have appeared in PN Review. He has published several essays on important figures of global modernism, including Szymborska, Brodsky, Montale & Transtromer. He helped edit 'The Novel: a biography' published by Harvard in 2014. In 2004 He was a winner of the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial award. In 2007 he was awarded a New Writers’ Bursary by the Scottish Arts Council. He continues to write: has completed a third collection, 'Sparkle Horse', and is working on a fourth.

The poem he reads here 'Belvedere', takes a beautiful dreamy oblique view of a life that no-one's ever quite sure is real.  It talks of permanence and transience, our twin controls. Is beauty sustainable? In this poem, at least, it is.

Gerry's Website Here;

www.gerrymcgrath.co.uk

His author page with Carcanet:

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=876

Belvedere

So they were sitting beside the belvedere, in shade.
And they were drinking, barely exchanging a word.
The sun was shining and words were beyond them.

Past the low stone wall lay the river. Further off,
lost in the thin blue air, were the island’s three peaks
yet to exist, as if they existed.

A breeze got up; the world tilted and water, seen
slopping up the side of a glass, pushed the air ahead,
carrying birds, the clink of ice, notes of lemon.

On the lawn children ran like small dogs, yelping
with a mix of terror and joy, and occasionally
a mother or father appeared to gather them in.

He thought there must have been days
when people forgot even that they had gone to sleep
and woken, re-born.

That they had flowed, like the river behind
the wall flowed, huge and still and countless,
grey as all rivers are grey.

The sun continued to shine and the breeze blew fresher
and he drank again and thought
in the eyes of small dogs days like this will come again.

Among the Blue

Somehow I wish I could say
it was indifference not love
that found the co-ordinates
for cormorants among the blue
the blue-white gulls

tell you that we have lived once
and will not come this way again

say to you that as long as art
teaches language of recovery
eternal reminders of morning
will grow on our sweat, spume,
tick softly on our lips, on our lips.

 

Party in the Backroom: Hugh Bryden at 70!!!

Hugh Bryden's in the Backroom today, or maybe he's not. Or maybe he is and he doesn't know it. I don't know: it's hard trying to arrange a secret party for folk in these pestilential times. One thing is for sure, and that is that Hugh Bryden is 70 today.

Hugh Bryden is a dynamo and creative genius whose own art work is exceptional but whose collaborations with a host of poets have received wide recognition and praise, well beyond Dumfries and well beyond Scotland.

Hugh Bryden was born in Dumfries on August 13th 1950. He was educated in Annan Academy and Edinburgh College of Art, where he was contemporary to an outstanding bunch of talents including Gordon Boyd and Billy Bunting. He graduated from Edinburgh in 1972 and moved back to Dumfries to teach the year after, as Staff tutor in Art for Dumfries and Galloway Region. Hugh had a succession of exhibitions and one man shows including ‘Paintings and Prints’ in Gracefield in 1990, ‘Prime Cuts’ in the Robert Burns Centre in 1993 and ‘Old Places, New Directions’ in the Otterburn Gallery in 1994. In 1996 he exhibited and held workshops in the Netherbow Theatre in Edinburgh, under the title ‘Hugh Bryden Print Makar’.

The poster for this exhibition included Bryden’s beautiful setting of my poem 'Ritual Roads, pictured on the right. I therefore claim precedence in his work with poets, Carafuego Press his innovative and beautiful collaboration with Tom Pow, beginning 3 years later in 1999. Hugh gave me a box of beautiful prints of these poems which I unfortunately left in a Dundee telephone box but I still have one, number 1 from 40.
(See 'POSTSCRIPT' at end)

His enthusiasm for Artists’ Book led him to lecture in the subject in Rochester New York in 2002, and in 2005 he founded Roncadora Press to pursue the form with a variety of different poets, including myself, and win several prizes. A short list of recent collaborators would be Hayden Murphy, Tom Pow, Graham Fulton, John Burns, Chrys Salt, Rab Wilson, Jean Atkin, Liz Niven, Andrew Forster, Donald Adamson, Willie Hershaw and Donald S Murray. Here are just a few choice testimonials from some of that motley crew.

What a fine artist you are, and what an honour to have collaborated with you on two limited edition collections – both small works of art in their own right. Both hand stitched, both sensitive responses to my poems, all sold out thanks to the high production values of Roncadora Press
- Chrys Salt

Such a generous man, his attention to detail legendary, his art and sensitivity to the words of others so surefooted.
- Jean Atkin

You’re also left in awe of his artistic skills. He’s incredibly generous with his time and talents and D & G are so lucky to have him in our midst.
- Liz Niven

Bryden is concerned with the artistic merit of a submission. Is it a voice that needs to be heard? Does it have something different and important to say? Does it meet with the publisher’s high artistic standards? These are the things that Hugh thinks about before he considers the writer’s reputation or how many yards of book shelves the work has the potential to shift
- Willie Hershaw

In honour of the man also here is a Tutu from Graham Fulton, a Tanka from Hayden Murphy and a Stonker from Donald S Murray.



TO HUGH:

           bearded seventy,
safely landed, ship shape. Sage,
       Thyme, Rosemary leafing.
Joy-riding with Heaney.     Jazz
in the garden of 2020.

Hayden Murphy


ACHANALT - for Hugh

You stepped where I - at that time - never stood,
on that station platform
to sketch memorial headstones,
water, moor and wood
and bring my verse to a different form of life.
Hugh, your drawings provide
return tickets to our inspirations,
a new way to arrive,
say, in that destination en route to Kyle
or Inverness. I marvel
at your artistry, the grace and skill
that makes observers stop and wonder,
shake their heads and smile.

Donald S Murray


As for me, I've always been in awe of his imagination and creative strength but I love his human qualities more. He drinks a bit, he's really generous and he's a good laugh. I suppose t the greatest strain this assemblage of virtues came under was during our great 'Doors' Collaboration in Dumfries. All Hugh's collaborations with poets amount, of course, to him doing all the work while the poets do eff all but actually building, painting and illustrating 8 life sized free standing doors while I sat and drank coffee or beer was, you would think, an imposition too much. It is to his huge credit that he didn't murder me, even though the strain of that entire operation is why he's 70 today rather than his true age, 55.

It should not be forgotten that Hugh is an accomplished poet, featuring in the seminal work of Dumfries and Galloway Scots poetry ‘Chuckies fir the Cairn’ published by Luath in 2009 and edited by Rab Wilson, and publishing his own pamphlet ‘If Ah could Talk tae the Artists’ which in 2008 was shortlisted for the Calum Macdonald Prize.

Hugh’s striking prints and linocuts grace many a wall in D and G and his generous discounting or delayed payments plans have enabled me over the years to make art lovers out of many relatives and friends. It will surprise no-one that Hugh has been spending the period of lock-down due to Coronavirus, on an ambitious project, painting 50 miniature icons and still-lives to exhibit as a celebration of his birthday. Hugh’s hands and brain are never still. He has more ingenuity and vim than anyone I’ve ever known. Let's celebrate a great Scottish Creative! Cheers Hugh!

Here he is reading some of his poems in the series 'If Ah Could Talk tae the Artists' outside the new Bazaar when he was still 69:

His Website Here:
https://www.hughbryden.com/


From 'If Ah Could Talk Tae the Airtists'


‘Ear Vincent,
there youse were, luggin canvases
aboot the countryside,
lobbin paint ontae thum.
Ah could wax lyrical aboot yer talent,
beat the drum, blow the trumpet, pinball medal on ye.
Yet, maist fowk ken ye fur jist wan thing,
An ah wouldnae lower the conversation bi mentioning
that cartilaginous portion -
or lack o it.
-at least no one earshot!

Pablo Picasso, a wurd in yer eye.
If ye could see the state o BritArt,
yer nose wud be richt oot o place.
Pickled coos, in unmade beds,
an thets jist the hef o it.
Ah’m no joking, thon urinal o Marcel’s
opent the floodgates,
the stuff’s everywhere.
The Market’s Saatchi rated.

What’s the crack, Georges Braque,
Ye multifaceted nan?
Those thir never, valued you ever,
cannae hiv seen the sides Ah can

Egon Schiele, Ah get a feel a,
unease in ma hert.
Whin Ah keek at, aa the geeks that,
populate yer art.

Ca canny, Edouard Manet,
wi yer luncheons in the grass.
Alfresco dinin’s great, but fave it mate,
this wee lass will freeze hit arse.



His Faither’s Voice


Ah woke huntin fur ma deid faither’s
voice, siftin ma mind’s sound Giles

Ah could see him clearly, smile
tugged squint bi a cigarette

felt ma bairn’s face flinch
frae his stubble embrace

smelt the oil thick tobacco
slick o his workshop

tasted his salty porridge
texture tied aroon ma tongue.

Still Ah couldny find the sound o him.
Fa’in back tae slumber, tho, Ah heard

Boy, is it no aboot time you wir getting up




*POSTSCRIPT! ANXIOUS IRISH POET SECURES BRAGGING RIGHTS!*

Hayden Murphy's lawyers have been in touch to make sure that everyone knows that estimable Irish poet's association with Hugh Bryden, their excellent and long lived Bloomsday collaboration, began in fact in June 1992, yonks before everyone else's. The man is quite right. I have settled out of court.

Back to the Backroom: The Extraordinary Carolyn Forché

How great to re-open the Backroom for Carolyn Forché who has sent us not just one video poem but two. A double delight and pleasure. Carolyn is one of the few modern poets who can tackle grand issues without sounding either angry or didactic. Instead she connects the personal to the political to create as she says a poetical language of witness designed to emphasise the poet's role in the "community rather than the individual ego."

The vision and range of her poems is vast- encompassing history, geography and philosophy- but it’s her language and lyrical skill I love, at times majestic, at times surprising but nearly always sublime. Have I called anyone in this series a Great Poet? I do think Carolyn is one of the greatest living writers in English.

Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, and has taught at several universities. She was Director of Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, and held the Lannan Visiting Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, where she is now a University Professor. Her many honours include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award, given in 1997 for using her poetry as a ‘means to attain understanding, reconciliation, and peace within communities and between communities’; and most recently, Yale University's Windham-Campbell Prize.

Her previous books include 'Gathering the Tribes'  in 1976 which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz, 'The Country Between Us' in 1981 reissued from Bloodaxe in 2019, which drew on her experiences in El Salvador before and during the civil war, and won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her later collections have drawn upon work written over many years: 'The Angel of History' from HarperCollins, USA and Bloodaxe Books in 1994, 'Blue Hour', HarperCollins, USA and  Bloodaxe Books, 2003, and, her latest, 'In the Lateness of the World'  published by Penguin, USA and Bloodaxe Books a few months ago.

Her hugely important anthology 'Against Forgetting' collected the work of 145 poets in 30 different languages who had experienced warfare, military occupation, imprisonment, torture, forced exile, censorship, and/or house arrest. The anthology, composed of the work of one hundred and forty-five poets writing in English and translated from over thirty languages, begins with the Armenian Genocide and ends with the uprising of the pro-Democracy movement at Tiananmen Square.
Her memoir 'What You Have Heard Is True: a memoir of witness and resistance'  in 2019 was published by Penguin.

Her translations include Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (with Munir Akash, 2003), Claribel Alegría's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991).

Here she is reading 'The Lightkeeper':

Here she is reading 'Museum of Stone':

5 poems in 'World Literature Today':

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2017/january/five-poems-carolyn-forche

A conversation about her latest book

https://www.ronslate.com/a-conversation-with-carolyn-forche/

Profile and More poems on Poetry Foundation Website:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carolyn-forche

Buy 'In the Lateness of the World' here:

https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/in-the-lateness-of-the-world-1059

The Light Keeper

A night without ships. Foghorns calling into walled cloud, and you
still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks,
darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward.
Through wild gorse and sea-wrack, through heather and torn wool
you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life:
the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost,
there since the era of fire, era of candles and hollow wick lamps,
whale oil and solid wick, colza and lard, kerosene and carbide,
the signal fires lighted on this perilous coast in the Tower of Hook.
You say to me stay awake, be like the lens maker who died with his
lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be
their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.
In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond,
seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out
for a long time. Also when fireflies opened and closed in the pines,
and a star appeared, our only heaven. You taught me to live like this.
That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing
to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread
from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships.

Museum of Stones


These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir–
stones, loosened by tanks in the streets
from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,
pebble from Apollinaire’s oui,
stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another,
stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, horneblende,
agate, marble, millstones, ruins of choirs and shipyards,
chalk, marl, mudstone from temples and tombs,
stone from the tunnel lined with bones,
lava of a city’s entombment, stones
chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,
paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown,
those that had flown through windows, weighted petitions,
feldspar, rose quartz, blueschist, gneiss and chert,
fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe
of a Buddha mortared at Bamiyan,
stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,
from a chimney where storks cried like human children,
stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,
altar and boundary of stone, marker and vessel, first cast, lode and hail,
bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with,
stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake,
stone bramble, stone fern, lichen, liverwort, pippin and root,
concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf,
all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk
with hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, would become
a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immoveable and sacred
like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.

Poems from the Backroom: Yuyutsu Sharma

Some good news about the #plague is that it is now going to be the focus of a weekly feature from Renfrew Libraries, dedicated to increasing interest in Scotland's poets and poetry, and I am hoping to perhaps spread this through other libraries too. The full catalogue of poets is available on the previous blog post and all poets- plus some bonus ones!- are available on #plagueopoems on YouTube. 

As I said previously, some poems are still coming in from parts of the world and the parts don't come much higher than this! Yuyutsu Sharma is the Laureate of the Himalayas, a world renowned poet and translator. Kabir Das  the 15th Century Indian poet, mystic and saint, said an aspiring poet should first set fire to his house and since leaving his university job in Kathmandu twenty years ago, Yuyutsu has spent much of his life travelling and to many people in many countries, he is the literary face of Nepal and the Himalayas.

He is a recipient of fellowships from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, The Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature. His work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Slovenian, Hebrew, Spanish and Dutch. He was at the Poetry Parnassus Festival organised to celebrate London Olympics 2012 where he represented Nepal and India. He travels widely, reading and holding workshops. Currently, he is visiting poet at Columbia University.

He has published ten poetry collections including, 'The Second Buddha Walk', 'A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems', 'Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems', 'Nepal Trilogy', 'Space Cake, Amsterdam' and 'Annapurna Poems'. Three books of his poetry, 'Poemes de l’ Himalayas' (L’Harmattan, Paris), 'Poemas de Los Himalayas' (Cosmopoeticia, Cordoba, Spain) and 'Jezero Fewa & Konj' (Sodobnost International) have appeared in French, Spanish and Slovenian respectively. Yuyutsu edits, Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing. 

Here he reads 'The Migrant Metaphor':

His Website and Blog:

http://yuyutsurdsharma.blogspot.com/

A Selection of Poems:

https://www.best-poems.net/yuyutsu_sharma/river.html

An interview : 

http://yuyutsurdsharma.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2016-10-11T06:58:00-07:00

A Link to 'Pratik':

https://niralapublications.com/new-booksarrivals/pratik-magazine/

The Migrant Metaphor


From my rooftop
I fear for their lives

these feral things
lying asleep for hours

as if turned into
a lump of sullen meat

crushed under
some gorilla tyres

of a wayward truck
or a supply vehicle.

Quiet
quarantined

small
smelly blurs

under empty flyovers
or vacant zebra crossings

warming their
damp lives

on the asphalt
of freshly pitched roads

for smooth
stately visits of dignitaries.

Exhausted after
restless sniffing for crumbs

dropped by
some wayward charity,

I see them
slumber into

a resigned voyage
to the netherworld

motionless with
the drooping inertia

not a limb moving
or an alert ear

twitching
to reassure life

unafraid of
surveillance trucks

or some emergency
ambulances hooting though

the fiendish silence
of highways that

might just crush
them into a squashed

little mound
of dead meat

shattering
their innocent,

stone soup
faith in the humanity

of this century’s
most eloquent

scoundrels.

The Flowers in their Baskets


The flowers in their baskets
do not smell of crisp books
or rhymes that sing of flowers of freedom.

Pale as pulp of their wiped out eyes
these are stones of destiny
heavy from watery weight of their juvenile dreams

sharp and brash
as the stones of bleeding mule paths
tearing a wound with
face of a stifled cry
in murky skies of their fast fading infancy.

(From 'Drunken Boat', Translated from the Nepali)