Poems from the Backroom 114: Tom Murray

Great poem here by Tom Murray on one of my own favourite themes, the very liminal space between fiction and fact, memory and reality. I don't know whether anyone else feels this but this is the most unreal time- most 'supernatural' time- I have ever experienced and in the journeys I make now, internal or external, there's a continual and discomfiting sense of replay. I don't like it. Stanley Kunitz one said "Memory is each poet's Poet-in-Residence'. Knowing what liars poets are, I don't think that helps, either. Time for beer, maybe, but not before enjoying Tom Murray.

Tom Murray is now resident in Dumfries and Galloway but spent much of his writing career in the Borders.  He started and ran the Galashiels Writers Group for nearly ten years and was co editor of the Eildon Tree Magazine from 1999 to 2011. He's been Writing Fellow to Tyne & Esk writers, Scottish Book Trust Reader In Residence to Scottish Borders Libraries, Writer in Residence to Clackmannanshire Council, Writer in Residence to Galashiels Academy and to Peebles High School. He was also a lecturer in Creative Writing at Borders College.

Although an award winning playwright with many productions to his name, he has also written poetry over a span of many years and been published in, among others, 'Rebel inc',  'Northwords', 'Cutting Teeth', 'Eildon Tree',  'Iota',  'Tears in the Fence',  'Northwords Now',  'Aesthetica',  'Envoi',  'Under The Radar',  'Acumen', and  'Postbox Magazine'. In 2006 his collection 'The Future is Behind You' was published by Lapwing Press

Here he is reading 'Two Memories':

Tom's Website:

https://tmurraytg.wordpress.com/

Tom's Blog: Postcards From Borderland

http://tommurrayborders.blogspot.co.uk/

Link to Tom reading one of his stories 'Soulmates':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zib_kVAFQgM

Two Memories

Crunching through knee high Russian snow.
Devouring pages of Dostoyevsky bread and vodka
Feeding my mind.
Burning thoughts into existence.
Murder, mayhem, good and evil square go in front of a burning log fire.
Can you say that the fledgling writer says to the murky candlelit room?
‘Och aye.’ Says Dostoyevsky! ‘Dinnae muck aboot. Get in there with your
Aching soul, pull up a chair and tell your tale.
Lay it bare, peel the skin off the face
Let the thoughts lie where they fall.’

I’ve never re visited the book.
Sometimes I doubt I even read it.
A memory picked up from someone else and re written for my own end.

Tell you a story.
Two cousins sitting beers in hand cherry picking the past.
Two cousins sitting beers in hand remembered white sheets Chaplain, Keaton,
Beamed along a smoky beam.
Two cousins sitting beers in hand nodding heads at the shared memory.
A projector stuttering to a stop
Mid Chaplain funny walk twirling walking stick.
The white screen sheet tumbling from the window
Crumpling Keaton’s deadpan face.
Hand up I’m one of the cousins.
Two hands up if I wasn’t even stardust in my daddy’s eye on movie nights.

Thing is: I was there.
Thing is: I read that book.
Thing is: Fiction or fact that’s me.


A Good Catholic

That Sunday came and went
Like any other but not.
Hours blurred by waiting
On flanked questions.
Good angels on either shoulder.

‘Is this how we brought you up?’
‘Everyone asking after you, what could we say?’
‘You don’t believe?’

The questions never came only the baffled looks.
The rigid tapping of fingers on chairs at Songs of Praise.
The concentrated laughter at Morecambe and Wise.

Atheist years rolled on and now the angels
Are with the angels.
No confession came.
No absolution.
You see how the language sticks like fat
On a stuttering heart.
It grows thicker by the years.

Sunday noon is when it bubbles and sparks
To burn.
A boy in a car on a road marked out by the accident
Of birth, of family’s gentle expectant squeeze on the arm.
‘This way.’

Sunday noon and I find myself searching photographs
Wondering if my father when he was a boy on a road
Marked out by accident of birth… Ever?
If my mother as she threaded
My arms into my straightjacket black buttoned coat…Ever?

Things I remember.
The holy row of ancient ladies chanting.
My father mourning his lost brother his own death
whispering in his ear.
The certainty that life is only the opening chapter.

Things I wonder.
What if it is?

(Reprinted from 'Acumen')

Poems from the Backroom 113: Jean O'Brien

Great to have Jean O’Brien in the Backroom today, a tremendously accomplished Irish poet. Good that she’s talking in one of her poems about fish too. I’ve been working on and off on poem sequence about The Salmon of Wisdom an old Irish tale in which a poet spends 7 years searching for a fish that contains the wisdom of the world, finally catches it and then unaccountably leaves it in the charge of someone else who eats it, thus acquiring all the knowledge of the world.

This seemed pretty typical poet behaviour to me -I wonder why the poet was sidetracked? Urgent need to submit a funding application? tweeting #salmonofwisdom OMG you’ll never guess what? More likely a bottle of something was getting opened, thus also confirming the eternal link between fish, poets and alcohol. I note Jean’s selected Poems is called ‘Fish on a Bicycle’ a reference to that famous feminist trope which also featured in a rather confused but highly successful Guinness advert of the late 1990s featuring some women miners, an empty maternity ward and of course a fish on a bicycle. Basically the message was - and remains I believe in perpetuity- whatever gender you are, drinking like a fish is a good thing.

Jean O’Brien has five collections of poetry, her latest being her 'New & Selected, Fish on a Bicycle' from Salmon Poetry in 2016,  reprinted in 2018 and is working on her next one. She is a prize winning poet having won, amongst others The 'Arvon International' and the 'Fish International'. Her work appears regularly in magazines, journals and anthologies. She is currently taking part in the former Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy’s on-line Covid Diary in conjunction with Manchester Univ called 'Write Where We Are Now'. Her poem 'Child' about the scandal of the Irish Mother and Baby homes was chosen by Poetry Ireland as one of their Poems on the Dart (Rail Transport) in 2019. She holds an M.Phil in creative writing/poetry from Trinity College Dublin and tutors in same. Her work has a deceptive simplicity but there's a nest of ironies, echoes and resonances just under the surface.

Here she is reading 'Breaking the Rainbow' and 'Transit':

Poems in Poethead:

https://poethead.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/no-cure-and-other-poems-by-jean-obrien/

An Interview in 'Island's Edge':

https://www.islandsedgepoetry.net/poets-a-k/jean-o-brien/

An Interview in 'The Wombwell Rainbow':

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2018/11/08/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-jean-obrien/


Breaking The Rainbow

The small flare of the firefly dancing and weaving
and you walking those shiny linoleum corridors.
Rags of hands twisting together, your throat raw
from the purple and pink, the yellow and blue tablets
that the white coated doctors carefully measure out.
Father reassuring with a lie that you would be home soon.

The chemical smell of you, that later would
smell like the lab at school when we fooled
around with compounds and flicked our fingers
in and out of the blue flame of the Bursen Burner
to feel the heat, feel how it might have felt
when they anointed and annealed you.

Weeks or months later the tin men send you home
to mother us, quiet and meek with only a haze of stars
in your grey eyes and the slight shake
of your hands giving it away. Charged you tried
and tried to earth yourself and play Good Wife,
Good Mother and failing on all fronts you collected
the rainbow of tablets from their bottles and jars
and like Antigone choose your own moment.

(New & Selected Fish on a Bicycle, Salmon Publishing)

Transit

Somewhere along the line on the chunnel train
from Paris to London the windows turn to mirror,
a sign that we have entered the tunnel.
We lean into vaulted walls as we stream by
unaware of weather, day or night, anything really,
except this silver lit tube
barrelling us across unseen borders.

I saw pictures of the huge machine boring its way,
with no room for error through the fragile
chalk and clay of Kent and under the seabed.
Another of men either side of the brink
shaking hands after drilling through the thin membrane
to one-another, in underwater détente.

Best not to think of the thousands of tons
of surging seawater bearing down on us,
in this black hole where no stars shine
and pulsars are light years away.
We ache with the weight of remembered water
and navigate on pre-ordained lines
as the silver thread we travel in unspools
always on the straight and narrow.
Better to sip coffee and watch our endlessly
reflected faces recede in nautical miles of mirror.

Imagine instead gills pulsing though our dimpled skin
as if breathing in the waters of the womb.
We are as migrating fish seeking home to the tune
of the catechism of announcements coming and going
in the digitised voice, fizzing with static
that could be Hal's electronic sister
both anchoring and urging us on our Odyssey
while cautioning. Mind The Gap.

(New & Selected, Fish on a Bicycle, Salmon Publishing)


Once I Woke

Even now there are places where a thought might grow – Derek Mahon

in a bed on the other side of the world to a waterfall
of light. As sleep cleared from my eyes I recognised
a sheer wall of net curtains transformed
by sunlight, knew then I was in a larger space
than ever before; as if some sextant in my head
had shot the sun, worked out the angle and height of light,
moon and stars, divined that I was far from home.
I tumbled from bed, steadied myself, stood upright
in this new upended world. I checked to see if the water
in the basin curled Coriolis clockwise, a myth of water.
Water memory can hold for hours and then swirl away
withershins as you try to determine drain spin
and trace earth’s rotation and wonder if you had
ingested Devil’s Berries or Psilocybin.
How we cling to what we know and resist boldly going.
The novelty of umber earth burnished in light and tar roads
that stretch out and out waiting for us to write our story.
Blacktops open to the wide sky, low scrub and miles of bush
beyond the firebreak offer some perspective. At home dirt roads
wend their way up hill and down hemmed in by low stone walls
or cliffs or sight of sea and the lariat line of guide-rope horizon.
This is a place where a thought might grow though racked
by drought with the northern hemisphere reduced to a mere echo.

(From 'Poetry Day Ireland' RTE)

Poems from the Backroom 112: Stewart Sanderson

Another marvellous poet looking into the black waters that are our past is Stewart Sanderson. It's a comfort that while we're generally bombarded with a history that is not our own, or our history represented as a footnote of another's, our poets are picking away at the seams, illuminating the gloom. Gloom doesn't come much gloomier than the so called 'Dark Ages' which have been fertile ground for poets, like Gerry Loose, previously in the series. I remember years back a few of my poems being included in a very worthy volume by Mainstream called 'Scottish History in Verse' and taking an awfie slagging for the fact that they were completely made up but I believe this is what history is essentially all about, and the History of the Dark ages particularly. Not "inventing" as Eavan Boland said, "but revealing". The ghosts and echoes of the language of the Picts can tell us about our condition now, as can the hopeful interpretation of the ancient wax tablet Stewart is describing in his video poem. Two Dark Age poems of Stewart’s are below.

Stewart Sanderson was born in Glasgow and is the recipient of several awards and commendations: In 2017 he received commendations from the PN Review Poetry Prize and the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2015. In 2016 he was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship.In 2014 and 2016 he was shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, and has been this year, too, in 2020! I am confident that his presence in #plagueopoems will ensure victory when the award is announced during the Edinburgh Book Festival.

A first pamphlet of poems, 'Fios', was published by Tapsalteerie in 2015, and a second one, 'An Offering', also published by Tapsalteerie, came out in 2018. Stewart is currently working towards his first full-length collection.

Here he reads 'Wax Tablet':

Stewart's Website:

https://stewartsandersonpoetry.com/

Tapsalteerie Page to buy 'Offering':

http://www.tapsalteerie.co.uk/product/an-offering-by-stewart-sanderson/

Pictish

Listen to the wind
where this language was –
the whisper as it passes
through the long
grass at St. Vigeans,
the leaves at Aberlemno.

Read on past the pause
where its king list
ebbs away into the waters
of a new tongue: so the river
Ewe runs downhill
towards its sea loch.

Reach out and touch
the topsoil to which
its syllables remain
attached: an anchor
lodged in sand years after
the ship has rotted.

Throw one last log
on the fire as you pronounce
their names – Nechtan and Brude,
Drostan and Drest – then let
them blend like smoke does
with the midnight air.


Dunadd

A hollow like a human foot
incised into the living rock
which I filled with my walking boot
one day, daring the sky to crack

at my temerity: but no
somehow the vault of heaven held
and holds, however many go
to do what only one, who ruled

the rest, was ever meant to do –
to stand where he might see his lands
unfold, then swear he would stay true
to what he saw. The image sends

a subtle tremor down my spine:
it would be good to promise this
and feel, behind you in a line
the others who came to this place

before you did, to prove their worth
by slipping off their hidebound shoes
and, bootless, promising the earth –
its browns, its greens, its greys and blues.

Poems from the Backroom 111: Angela Graham

The disastrous news about vernacular Gaelic this week sharpens our anxieties about the other spoken languages of our islands. It seems no amount of special attention can encourage significant numbers of people to speak them as a matter of course, rather than learn them as a matter of interest. It would be a disaster if that most lyrical and beautiful language were not to survive, and thrive. I've always thought that Scots stood a better chance because its already got a foothold in the way that ordinary folk talk and tell stories. In a way many of us are already speaking it even if we think we aren't. Our guest in the backroom today, Angela Graham, is a Welsh speaking writer from Northern Ireland; and and much of her work is informed by the discourse between Irish, Ulster-Scots, Scots and English.

Angela’s had two bursaries From Arts Council Northern Ireland, one in 2017/18 to develop her novel 'Thorn' which is about the politics of language (Irish and Ulster Scots) in contemporary Northern Ireland, and one  I have written poetry and prose in Ulster Scots, and another to support her prose and poetry exploration of Place and Displacement in Northern Ireland. Poems from this have appeared in 'The Honest Ulsterman' and 'The Interpreter’s House' and she has also appeared in 'The North', 'Poetry Wales' and the 'Ogham Stone'. Her short story collection, 'A City Burning' will be published in October 2020 by Seren Books. She has a blog on work inspired by Gorse in Irish, Ulster Scots, Scots and English.

I must admit to not being familiar with her work until quite recently. I have been amazed by some of the poetry I've come across in the #plague, I've always seen poetry as a solitary pursuit but this immersion has made me think its all a tapestry, a universe of many stars and I can't see enough of it now.

Angela Graham's poetry is gritty but yet fragile, beautifully wrought, occasionally elegiac in tone. She's a wonderful writer. Buy her stuff!

Here she is reading 'Autun Cathedral, Magi' which, along with two other poems, is transcribed below:

Her Website:

http://angelagraham.org/portfolio/

Two Poems and a Short Story from 'Honest Ulsterman':

https://humag.co/authors/angela-graham


Autun Cathedral, Magi

Does the sky have tent-poles?

And some cathedrals are forested.
God walks in their depths on a December afternoon
while the topmost branches brush the undersides
of planets fixed mid-orbit
− those stained-glass windows fruiting overhead.
Here no one thinks of weight, of downwardness
and how the roof desires it.

God pauses among the pillars
at a carved capital that always lifts his heart:

an artist like himself, from this blunt-cornered oblong stone,
gives us a bird’s view of a bed
draped in a ruched counterpane, three kings tucked in,
but the eyes of one, popped open, register
Why? Who? still unaware
of the angel at his shoulder, stroking his hand,
whose other index finger points at a star.

God sighs, at the weight borne by the moment
after such a moment; at how he waits
for a man to look up at the sky
and recognise and seize
the chance of joy.


An Irish Covid Gift.

I’ve made a Spring bouquet for you, my love,
of gorse. ‘Harsh!’ you’ll recoil. ‘For this harsh time?’
Yes, and not yes. It’s true, gorse is a glove
of blood for any hand, a paradigm
of touch-me-not, a keep-your-distance hedge.
Gorse ‘bears it out even to the edge of doom’,
endures, defends, fends off the slightest touch.
Why? For the sake of its exotic bloom:
a golden purse, sheathed in pistachio green,
that flings its riches to the cloudy skies
till Ireland swoons, drenched in a heady rain
of tropical perfume, a paradise.
I will be gorse while we are kept apart,
with you The Land of Spices in my heart.

(From 'Pendemic')


Shoot

Winter came early for that girl
When the unreturning brother –
The endlessly prevented youth –
Was thrown first in a ditch
And then a grave.

She was the Winter’s girl,
Wearing its icy dress,
So when she saw one parent
Smash the other’s face into a wall
She wasn’t fazed. She understood how well
The rounded skull fits to the palm;
How deep the need to make pain visible since he
Had been hooded when they tortured him.

But she − to Mammy and Daddy both −
She had become
As faint as frost on glass.
Then even the mirrors emptied.

A neighbour, meaning to be kind,
Had asked her to help him set December bulbs,
Late possibilities. She’d cupped a Winter White,
A cranium, papery-skinned and primed,
But when his back was turned
She’d plunged the bulb in upside down,
Cursing it to torment itself
In growing towards the dark.

Since she was a murderer too
She sentenced herself to drink till she was sick
On school-nights out beyond the playing fields.
Thirteen,
And only the cold would do.

But a long dormancy
Can keep something alive.
Forty years on, even the Winter tired
Of cold. It dis-adopted her,
Heading for Spring
When she shouldered her dying mother
And felt how well that heavy head
Fitted the hollow below her collar-bone,
In that embrace sensing
A possibility, though late.


(From 'The Bangor Literary Journal')

Poems from the Backroom 110: Chris Boyland

I was talking recently about the rise of the video poem, which comprises the core of this blog of course. I was late to the medium and when Robert Campbell Henderson provided film to the words on the 'Blash o God' project last year I was delighted at how the apparent disconnect of word and image he chose really worked. There's a long history of poetry and film of course, which blossomed in dadaist circles in Paris and elsewhere in the twenties and thirties. Man Ray's fantastic ‘L’ Etoile De Mer’ based on a poem written by surrealist poet Robert Desnos, for instance.

Computer and digital technology has allowed for a creative explosion of animated poetry. Tim Burton's first animation in 1982, 'Vincent' was based on his own poem of the same name, in which a small boy dreams of becoming Vincent Price and scares himself to death. Local to me, the Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association enabled the brilliant Hugh Bryden to do animated film poems for a variety of D and G poets in 2008, and the form goes from strength to strength. Our guest in the Backroom today is Chris Boyland and his two fantastic animated poems, 'The Letters' and 'The Towers' are linked below.

Chris Boyland was born in Coventry and lives in Cumbernauld. The Scotsman has called him“dream-like, smoky and contemplative”. His poems have been accepted or published by magazines and anthologies such as: '404Ink', 'Gutter', 'The North', 'The Poets’ Republic' and 'New Writing Scotland'.

His debut pamphlet ‘User Stories’ addresses a mixture of intimate and shared scenarios and looks at the public concerns we all have -pre/post-Brexit, pandemicised Britain- through the perspectives of past and present. Its "twenty short pieces are examples of poems that are window panes rather than mirrors, that take as their starting point the writer Hanya Yanagihara’s edict that 'the world outside the self is worth writing about'”.

'User Stories' is available from the independent, Scottish small press Stewed Rhubarb and there is a link to buy this below: Here is Chris Boyland reading 'Letters':

'The Letters', Animated Film here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq5tZwp8kDE

'The Towers', Animated Film here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSdVR3PUtR8

Link to buy Chris' book from Stewed Rhubarb Press:

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/user-stories-cd-boyland/

The Letters


Over the town, it rains letters
written on good notepaper
on exercise book paper,
on anything at all
scraps and screeds and tracts
fluttering from the sky, like falling kites
each one anonymous, addressed only, ‘to my love.’

In the absence of names, people make up stories
‘There’s a letter here’, they say, ‘for everyone in the town.’
and they scurry about, trying to find theirs
reading from letters draped over clothes-lines
and lying on pavements.

The wind catches handfuls of paper
and blows them along the streets
unwanted letters lie soggy and bleeding ink in gutters
until men in overalls come and sweep them into heaps
‘Where do they come from’, people ask,
‘who has written these words, these thoughts, these ideas
these lists of things not to forget?’
‘And, why are they falling from the sky?’

I know, but I tell no-one. I collect as many as I can.
Lay them out on my kitchen table, smooth away their creases
and read them and re-read them, over and over and over again.

These are all the letters I could have written
the things I could have said to you, but never did.

(Animated film produced and directed by Sarah Grant, creative vocals by Wils Struthers,
music composed and performed by Fiona Liddell-Thorne, based on an original arrangement by
Jen Hughes, recorded at Unit55 Studios, Cumbernauld)


The Towers


High over the city, at the bottom of the garden
far off in the distance, at the end of our street
stand the ghost towers

Nobody talks about them
but we make a daily obeisance
to their looming presence
that presses on us, like a blood clot on the spine

Families light candles, in the mornings
and at meal-times and place them on household altars
with other charms and relics, citizenship paper
coins and notes, bank statements and and letters from the DWP
to ward off the long shadow, the darkness at the door

Sometimes the charms protect us, often they do not
and we wake in the morning
to see that our neighbour’s house is empty
that our friend is not there to meet us on the way to school
that someone else we know has gone, to live in the ghost towers

We see the spectral tenants of the towers
around the city, in the streets and in the parks
transparent hands outstretched
calling out, reaching out, to passers going by
who mostly, ignore them

After a while, they fade
and fall between the cracks
and no-one sees them anymore

Except at night
when we wake up in our shaking beds
to the cold, bright light shining through the window
and we look out and - there, in the distance
there, at the bottom of the garden, stand the ghost towers
white as salt bleached bone
every window lit up with an electric imprecation
every window with a face, pressed against the glass
and we know, though we cannot hear them
that every face has a voice and every voice is calling

Are we not your brothers, oh my brother?
Are we not your sisters, oh my sister?
Are we not your mothers, oh my daughter?
Are we not your fathers oh my son?

And in the morning, they are gone.


(Animated film produced and directed by Sarah Grant Creative, vocals by Chris Boyland and
Jen Hughes,  music composed and performed by Fiona Liddell-Thorne,  recorded at
Unit55 Studios, Cumbernauld)

Poems from the Backroom 109: Renita Boyle

Well the Craigdarroch is preparing its beer garden and Scotland is opening up in mid-month so it feels like this strange hiatus is slowly shifting, in actual physical terms and in the mind. The #plagueopoems is going to go on for a wee while longer, till an important anniversary is reached, but it too is beginning to pull up the blinds. We have a great finale in store and several important journeys still to make, however. I hope folk have been impressed by the Dumfries and Galloway contingent- it is my belief that we’re more of a literary powerhouse now down here than we ever were.

On that subject, a word here for a wee writers group that radiates round the anarchic presence of the splendidly cantankerous Gaelic bard Andrew Wilson and his shop Beltie Books in Wigtown. Though it’s three days travel from where I live, I like to call this group a home from home and the quality of its writers has consistently surprised. It’s a haven of warmth, craft and gossip even in the virtual world.

One of its members for a while was a Wigtown Book Festival regular who I would never have seen previously without a chicken costume or a cowboy hat. Renita Boyle has been dressing up and telling stories to weans in Wigtown for a long time and that is just fantastic but we got an insight into a more serious minded poet when she was with us. Of course it’s a theme isn’t it, specially among those decadent French poets, the poet and the clown, the laughing face and the face concealed.

Renita Boyle is storytelling ambassador for Wigtown Festival Company, patron of reading for Saint James Primary in Renfrew and has been Scottish Book Trust reader in residence for DG Libraries.
She has been DG Life Performing Artist of the Year finalist, storyteller in residence with ShetlandArts and winner of Wigtown Poetry Competition Scots category with the very moving winning poem 'Sloe Jen' which is reprinted at the foot of the page. Renita is from Clear Lake, Wisconsin and here invokes her grandmother and grandfather having Coffee in the Cabin:

Renita’s  Website here:

www.renitaboyle.com

Facebook Site:

https://www.facebook.com/TaleTwisters

Recordings:

https://soundcloud.com/renita_boyle

Coffee in the Cabin


I wake to the first creak of the floorboards
the rustle of my grandfather pulling on his bibs
the click-click of the buttons on their fasteners
and the muffled slamming of the door as he heads
into the near dawn wet with dew

The pumping of the long red handle draws water
from the well that he dowsed and helped to drill
spills and sploshes until the rust runs clean
and the pail is full and sloshing
on its way back in from the chill

I hear the clanking of the dipper tap its metal sides
peek out from my mouse nest of tied quilts
see my grandmother in her nightie
spark a match and light the stove
fill the coffee pot bring it to a boil

The smell of Folgers drifts out from the big red can
two cups come down from the cupboard one white
the other the colour and shine of a green apple
my grandparents sit at the table
my grandfather filling his pipe
my grandmother filling his cup

I don’t drink coffee but when I migrate North
sense them lingering near their empty chairs
enough to make we want to pour a cup
join them at the table sip their presence


Sloe Jen

Bide til the blackthorn aches wild
wi yon slaw loss o simmer days

heaves wechtie aneath its sloes
fou an ripe an roond
draik wi the cruin o the jenny wren
whase nest be empie nou

Bide til the wee-oors aifter
the first bite o frost appens thair skins
frees a treel o sweetness
intae blaikent gin skies
stains the speerit blae-black wi fledging
lang ago lullabies

Then gaither aw yon grief can bide
frae awantin him hame
preek yon hert wi the shairp neb o a jag
an lat it greet

Poems from the Backroom 108: Colin Will

Great to have Colin Will in the Backroom today, a fine example of the poet-librarian.

He's in good company: Jorge Luis Borges worked as a municipal librarian at the Miguel Cane Branch Library in Buenos Aires and of course Philip Larkin, who also switched from the municipal library system to the academic, worked in Queens University Belfast and Hull. 

"How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up" said Larkin. I often felt the same, hiding for several decades in the staff toilet in Dumfries Academy and this might explain why Colin came late to poetry, or returned to it late after a distinguished working life. He worked with West Lothian Libraries before taking a science degree and moving to the British Geological Survey Edinburgh Library in 1973 and thereafter to the Royal Botanical Garden in Edinburgh in 1988. He received a PhD and served two terms on the Scottish Library and Information Council, and in 2000 was President of the Scottish Library Association. His skills stood him in good stead to play a formative role in the establishment of two essential institutions, StAnza and the Scottish Poetry Library, both of which he served for a time as Convener or Chair.

His first poetry book was the great 'Thirteen Ways of Looking At the Highlands' published by Diehard. He has since published eight others, the latest, from Red Squirrel Press, being

'The Night I Danced With Maya'. Having had a press of his own, Calder Wood, which published the first collections of many poets he is now Editor at Postbox Press, the literary fiction imprint of Red Squirrel Press, and is himself preparing a new collection of short stories to be published in 2021. He's also an active member of the STEM poets group, which aims to promote the inclusion of real science in poetry. He also plays the saxophone and is a great gardener. He's obviously never heard Michael Longley's words- "As you get older, you get the hang of things, and just when you're getting the hang of things, its time to die." Colin continue to be a dynamo with a great poetic legacy behind him and a fistful of projects still in hand. 

Here he is reading 'Starting a New Normal':

Colin's Website here:

Website: www.colinwill.co.uk

His SPL Profile and three more poems here:

http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/colin-will/

His Blog here:

https://sunnydunny.wordpress.com/


Starting a new normal

I saw my family at the weekend.
Not all of them of course, the ones
who live in Dunfermline.
The other half live in Germany,
across too many regulations,
jurisdictions and conditions,
and with Brexit looming
like a bad dark cloud.

I see them on the screens
of my computer or my phone,
we correspond by email,
but it’s what we’re used to.
They’ve lived there for years,
and my son’s now a German citizen,
so they’re staying there, dividing time
between Germany and France.

No, this was the Fifers, come to see us
for the first time in thirteen weeks,
and that was something we’d missed.
Did we distance? Did we hell.
They came in the door, the wee dug
first to greet us; they offered hugs
and we hugged, like it was the first hug,
or like we’d never been apart.


An invitation

Do you remember that first glass
of Vouvray? That tingle? A little bit of bite?
My garden’s like that today, everything
opening up. It smells of growth,
as warmth releases little puffs
of energy from every stretching stem.

We’ll walk along the narrow path
so you can feel the forms of leaf
and twig on either side. And then
the lawn, how your steps compress it.
It does no harm; it springs back
after we’ve gone.

Listen to the wind pushing through
the birch trees, moaning in the wires,
notice how the sun’s heat
switches on and off – cloud shutters.
Then we’ll sit, sheltered, and talk,
my cat in your lap or mine,
and we’ll try to make sense
of our separate worlds.

(Reprinted from 'Clear Poetry')