BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer


Elizabeth


  • Making Connections

    a tall grey cupboard with open shelves containing a sewing box, threads, boxes of art materials, pestles and mortars seeds and essential oils

    We are beginning to feel a little less transitory now. A lot of boxes have been unpacked (though there are many more to go) and we have had a chance to think about what we own and how we use it, so our living spaces are becoming more welcoming, and our working spaces more organised and accessible. This is my herb and craft cupboard, which holds a lot of random stuff – materials and equipment, including my camera, which now has its own proper place – that used to be scattered across a lot of nooks and crannies, so that every job was harder to get started, to organise or to clear away afterwards. There is a big bookcase in this room too, so all my reference books and files will be where I need them.

    There are small forays outside now, too. A month before we moved I had a nasty flare-up of my rheumatoid arthritis, and for a long time walking was very difficult. But if RA is sneaky and excruciatingly disabling, it is also variable, which means that it can abate as fast as it came. This week has been suddenly a lot better, and we have been walking up the field track, meeting cows, still outside, and some horses – and also a raven, which we didn’t expect – and into the town a couple of times, which has meant the opportunity to see a whole new range of plants growing on what looks like a subsoil of heavy clay. There are even bulrushes in some of the open spaces between the streets, which implies some very wet ground beneath.

    a rusty railing, beyond which is a sparawling urban skyline and a view out to hills. A cloudy sky.

    I am enjoying the feeling of looking out from this high point. It’s not that high as Scotland goes, but we do have an open aspect over miles of counntry. A lot of it is the glittering urban sprawl of Glasgow – a high rise or two, a lot of pylons and a couple of television masts, but there are belts of woodland, open green country and some very distant hills. After being right at the bottom of the Forth Valley, this feels exhilarating and welcoming.

    We are getting to know our neighbours, and their animals – almost every house has a dog or a cat, and next door has rabbits, too. The birds I thought were quite scarce seem to be here too, but shy. We put up a feeder, and they came – blue tits, wrens, robin, starlings and sparrows. Clearly, I just have to make an effort to stop and look, be quiet and let them show themselves when they are ready. But sometimes, you get something really unexpected – last night, I looked out of my window and saw a fox crossing the street. It is clear that there are going to be many different kinds of connections to be made to this territory.


  • Putting Out Roots

    a fence, some leylandii saplings a hill looking towards a belt of conifers

    Okay, it doesn’t all look like this. We are in a newbuild housing estate, with construction only just coming to an end, and it’s as suburban as you can imagine. But go along the path at the side of the house, follow it round, and you come to this. I imagine that when those leylandii get going you won’t even see the farmland, but there’s a path up to a ruined castle, a burn, and some very interesting haggard plants between the corporate landscaping.

    mugwort

    First you are called/ oldest of herbs – mugwort, according to the Charm of Nine Herbs. It is growing freely on a wild patch of land between the houses. On one side of the path is scorched earth, as if someone has put weed-killer, and might add lawned spaces, but just now there is mugwort, chickweed, nettle and all sorts of good things.

    Kate Unwin of The Moon and the Furrow suggested that the disputed atterlathe which I mentioned here, might be this plant, which I found growing against our fence:

    a clump of bistort in flower

    It is called bistort. I’m not quite convinced about the identification – bistort has another Old Englsh name naeddrewort, but it is possible that it was known by several names in different parts of England, or that there were several plants called naeddrewort, or simply that Old English scholars aren’t that great at botany. Bistort does have the anti-inflammatory and alterative properties ascribed to atterlathe, and it is a common herb, very plentiful – and on my back doorstep.

    The birds in the Place of the Fire are very different – plenty of crows, jackdaws and magpies, lots of starlings, but very few sparrows. I did hear a wren in the haggard on our second day, but although there are plenty of berries, both birds and bees seem to be much scarcer than they were in Stirling. The shape of the garden is more or less fixed, but I will have to do something to make the planting more wildlife-friendly.

    We are almost settled here now, after a fortnight. We have unpacked almost half the boxes, and bought kitchen storage and work-spaces. We are going to build a lot more bookshelves next, which will create a library, and a quiet space for chilling out when all the family is together (I am thinking of Tolkein’s Hall of Fire in Rivendell now). Two of our grandchildren have visited several times, and the other is coming to stay for half-term tomorrow. The Place of the Fire seems to be more open to the wind than the Territory of Rain, but it hasn’t been short of a shower or two since we got here. It is slightly milder and I am just about getting used to the East-West orientation, which means the sun comes up looking directly into my new office.

    New poetry has not yet happened here, though I have done some editing and participated in an online reading at Gloucester Poetry Festival. It was enormous fun, though the great Facebook meltdown (and related online disruption) meant we had a very small audience.

    Sadly, the great poet (and all-round wonderful person) William Bonar died recently. I was lucky to have the opportunity to go to his funeral last Friday and pay tribute to him, to his gifts as a poet, to his generosity to other writers and to his enormous contribution to the Glasgow poetry group, St Mungo’s Mirrorball. He will be much missed.

    It will be a week or two before posts on this blog get back to normal, but ideas are beginning to trickle in, especially round the climate conference next month. I look forward to making you more acquainted with the Place of the Fire over the next few months!


  • Hearth Moon

    How it started:

    empty bookshelves

    How it’s going

    a big stack of boxes

    Someone posted on Facebook today that this full moon is known as the Hearth Moon, which seems like a good moon under which to move to the Place of the Fire! We will be out of here next Monday, and this website will be getting a makeover. The shop will close tomorrow, and reopen on the 7th October (appropriately enough, National Poetry Day), but the website itself will be down for refurbishment from the 26th September to the 2nd October.

    I will be at a last event in Stirling on the 26th September, taking part in One Weekend in Stirling. Because it is so close to the date of the move, I absolutely cannot afford to get pinged, so I will be last in, and first out, and will have to miss all the wonderful events on offer, but if you’re in Stirling, give the page a look – there is something for everyone here. And I want to take the opportunity to thank the wonderful people at WriteAngle who organise it, for all the joy they spread, and all the creativity they enable.

    This is a farewell to the Territory of Rain, which has sheltered my family and my poetry for almost forty years. However, there’s a Scottish song that sums up how I feel right now:

    We’re no awa tae bide awa’.
    We’re no’ awa’ tae leave ye.
    We’re no’ awa’ tae bide awa’,
    We’ll aye come back and see ye!

    big willow against snowy Ochil Hills


  • The Place of the Fire

    fireplace at Tappoch broch, ashes overgrown with fern and bramble

    This is from Tappoch Broch near Larbert. The hearthplace is clearly still used every now and then by people camping out, and I found that continuity rather moving when we visited last September. The hearth as a metaphor for home has a long history, so I have chosen it as a reference for the new territory, although we are moving to a modern house with no actual fireplace. I will have to have a firepit outside! Fire struck me as a good reference point, because it is in a coal-mining area with a long tradition of ironworking, and I was already thinking of fire while I was finishing The Well of the Moon.

    It is a more hilly place than here, and on higher ground – though nothing spectacular. The territory of rain is at sea level, and the place of the fire is only about a hundred feet above, but it makes a difference. The new house faces east/west rather than north/south, and the garden is more open to the sky, without our tall hedges. I expect I will miss the sparrows! There are plenty of oak and beech and hawthorn trees, some ash, but not, as far as I have seen, many willows – which I will miss – but I don’t think the land is much drier. Maps show several drainage ditches emptying into a network of burns flowing down towards the Clyde. I haven’t yet had too much opportunity to explore, partly because of activity here, but mostly because I’ve had a bad flare-up of my rheumatoid arthritis, which has made it difficult to walk. (It’s getting better now, luckily.) You will see a lot more about it when I do, however, under the Place of the Fire category.

    This is also going to be the catchall for my next writing projects. The publication of The Well of the Moon, and the move prompted me to focus more on how I work and what else I might do. There is a whole new look planned for this website, with an extra page for non-fiction. It will cover the process of settling into a new landscape, and the issues it throws up for learning to belong in new communities, but will also cover the research I have done on herbs, poetics and the philosophy behind it all.

    seedheads of thistle, dock and hogweed

    It won’t be long now. We have started clearing the old house, which is gradually filling up with cardboard boxes. I’ve packed twenty boxes of books already (including David Morley’s Fury, which is why I haven’t yet posted my review of it!) and there are ten still to do, although Callander Bookshop got an awful lot. The herbs to go have been potted up, the kitchen is next, and the dreary process of informing everybody who needs to know the change of address has started. It’s all beginning to feel real, and a lot more exciting!


  • Moving On

    herb plants in pots against a white wall
    Plants to go

    Well, the swifts are leaving, and so are we. There has been much less activity here than usual, because the move that we have been planning for the last year or so is finally happening. It’s all down to the paperwork now, and there will be more news when it is all done. I am hoping to pick up the pace in the autumn when we are finally settled!

    In the meantime The Well of the Moon has attracted a lot of very kind attention on social media, and you can find a very lovely review by Tom Kelly on the Burnedthumb Facebook page, if you do Facebook!

    cover of The Well of the Moon, deep blue with a crescent moon and feverfew

  • Home Is Where the Heart is

    shelf with hurricane lamp vase of flowers and statue

    The thing I notice most of all as I view potential new homes, is that they are all spaces for love. It can take many different forms. Some houses have photos of the children everywhere, and bedrooms tailored to their tastes and interests – wall decorations, teepees for reading, film posters and bedding emblazoned with their favourite TV characters. Some have been enhanced by DIY – customised storage, fancy lighting, a beautiful and complicated decor – some of which has been cherished well beyond its normal expiry date. Sometimes it’s the garden which has been looked after while the house gently decays. Sometimes the rooms reflect the owner’s passions – a well-used cooker, musical instruments, rows of DVDs. I’m sorry to say that very few houses contain many books!

    The ones that move me are the ones where someone obviously died. The decoration hasn’t been maintained, the furniture is old and battered, but children have put in new central heating, or an adapted bathroom, or simplified a garden so that a parent can be comfortable, and stay in their own home until the end.

    Sometimes the structure of a house has been neglected, or a garden has gone to seed (or worse, been put under astroturf or gravel), but there’s always evidence that something has been cherished. Someone’s heart has been in this home. walk into it, treading softly. It feels quite privileged to be able to think about taking it over.

    I was going to think some more about ‘those who disappeared’, in this post because there are a lot of ambiguities in that phrase that I need to explore, as I think of starting in somewhere new, and I thought I would follow up with a review of David Morley’s Fury, which has a very pertinent take on the subject, but I was caught off balance by the process of house viewing (and selling). I thought I’d strike a warmer note while I can. So here is an indication of some of the loved things in my house:

    From the Garden

    A tomato should be warm,
    the skin loose as on a granny’s hands,
    fine as satin, but electric bright
    with hoarded sun, a blaze.
    The scent of that twiggy stalk
    will cling to your hands all day

    Your knife must be sharp.
    When the edge is only a little blunt
    the silky skin puckers and the cut
    is ragged, the flesh bruised,
    and all the sweet fluid lost.
    You pierce the skin, and slice.

    Red circles fall under your hands.
    Seeds cling to the core, suspended
    in a jelly carapace, a swim of juice.
    Salt grains, fragments of crushed
    black pepper, sweet balsamic sting
    of dressing – summer on a plate.

    a sliced tomato

  • Those Who Disappeared

    Tappoch Broch - a low wall overgrown with heather, barcken and seedling birch
    Tappoch Broch, near Larbert

    We are haunted by those who went before. One strand of The Well of the Moon deals with this haunting, not only by our ancestors – though mine do seem to hang about a lot – or the people who actually lived in your house or your village before you, but by the myths we create about them. I have no evidence, for instance, that my ‘first Honora’ was the woman whose obituary appeared in The Waterford News in 1938 after her death at the age of 113, and her hedge school is a matter of family myth, but we all believe in the importance of access to education to this day. The village where I have lived for the last 39 years is convinced we are haunted by monks from the ruined abbey, and the comment from my Benedictine friend that they NEVER haunt and anyway they weren’t monks but Canons, does not cut it with anyone.

    The poem Lost Roads is also about this. It was a post about buried roads here

    https://2bogsaswampandsomeislands.wordpress.com/2019/05/19/footprints-of-history-on-the-bog/

    that started me off, together with a walk through the Avalon Marshes where you can still see a replica of the neolithic Meare Track. There is a tendency to annex these things, to want them to be Roman when they are later, or sometimes even earlier than is generally supposed. Often associated in the past with the late Roman queen Helen (who is said to have been the mother of the emperor Constantine and to have discovered the burial place of the True Cross), there is now a tendency to merge her with the goddess Elen of the Ways. The real Helen has disappeared, like the ancient Britons we have transformed into fairy folk or the people of the Sidh. And yet we crave their presence, and revere their wisdom, as far as we can find it.

    I have been thinking about this as I begin to plan to live somewhere new. I have a lot of books, which will take up space in the house and a lot of plants already to put in the new garden. We tend to think about ‘putting our stamp’ on a new home, and making it our own, but it is fatal to imagine you can create a stage set for a drama in which I will take the lead. What I’ve got is a bit part in a soap that has been running for centuries. I will try to connect with what has gone before, with the soil conditions, the prevailing weather, the plants that thrive and the communities that flourish there, but I wonder what I will be erasing, who will be forgotten, will disappear and return as myth.

    a stone arch overgrown with heather and grass
    arch at Tappoch broch


  • Gifts from the Garden

    sprays of pink martagon lilies against a background of meadowsweet and yellow flag foliage

    This is our last summer in this garden, and it has been especially generous. In spite of the long cold spell, everything seems to have done well. The tulips were magnificent, the witch hazel (which sulked and grew very slowly for about ten years) suddenly put on about a metre of new growth, the roses are outdoing each other in flower production and the chamomile bed has bulked up nicely. I have been trying to grow these martagon lilies for at least twenty years, and now, here they are.

    gallica roses in full bloom

    The berries are doing well too. For the first time I got enough blackcurrants to make a pot of jam, and the branches of the redcurrants are bending with the weight of berries. I’m not sure what to do with them – there is only so much redcurrant jelly two people can use, and though they combine very well with other fruit – especially raspberries, I’m running out of ideas. Possibly the blackbirds will solve that problem for me! The gooseberries did very well too, but the sawfly caterpillars found them, and the bushes are looking pretty stark just now.

    I have started a pot pourri pot in a cafetiere – just the thing to keep the layers of petals pressed down. You layer partially dried rose petals, aromatic leaves, lavender and anything else fragrant – I have lemon balm, scented geranium leaves and verbena, and I will add lavender bog myrtle leaves and costmary as I go – with sea salt and a few drops of brandy, press down hard and leave to mature for several weeks. When we get to the new house, I will break up the petal-cake, mix it with some properly dried rose petals for glamour, and some spices, and it should make the new house smell like home.

    a bowl of pot pourri and a candle

    I have also finally achieved two things the herbals all tell you to do, and which I have always found impossible up to now. One is to make furniture polish scented with sweet cicely. Apparently the trick is to crush the green seeds and leave them in a mix of beeswax and turpentine gently melted together (very gently – turpentine is inflammable. The book suggests leaving it in the sun, but the sun in my garden wasn’t hot enough) until the scent is imparted to the liquid. I strained the seeds out afterwards, which wasn’t easy, because the mixture sets while you’re looking at it, and the result is excellent.

    The other is furniture polish from horsetails. Horsetails have been the bane of my life, and I was dying to find some use to make of them. The trick is to leave a LOT of horsetails to soak in water for several hours, and then simmer the mix for 15 minutes. This is anti-social. It smells vile. The strained liquid, however, is a very fine silica solution, and it does indeed polish pewter very well without scratching, leaving a lovely pearly glow. Credit for finally making these remedies work goes to Herbs About the House by Philippa Back, published in 1977 by Darton Longman and Todd. It’s long out of print but actually available on Amazon.

    I have taken cuttings, potted on seedlings and divisions of my favourite plants, and I’m saving seeds as they come. Glasgow doesn’t seem to run to big gardens, and what they do have seems to consist of astroturf and patio entertaining spaces, but I am laying my plans. The half-a-hundred herbs will find their places in the new garden!

    a row of lavender heads, and a welsh poppy

  • The Well Has Landed

    cover of The Well of the Moon

    The Well of the Moon had its first outing last Thursday, courtesy of St Mungo’s Mirrorball, and in very distinguished company. Ellen McAteer and William Bonar (whose books I had the privilege of editing) launched their books (you can get them both from Red Squirrel Press) and Vahni Capildeo headlined, and was awesome.

    I’ve added the book to the shop, and so far 27 copies have made their way to people all over the country, so I hope they are enjoying the poetry. Red Squirrel Press is arranging a formal launch in the next fortnight – I will add a post to confirm the date.

    I have put my editing hat back on now, and there are no less than three books on the go, two full collections and a pamphlet, and there is the prospect of an anthology later on too. Plus we are still in the process of moving house. We have been held up by repairs to this house, but the last ones have been booked in. Meanwhile the housing market has taken off, and twice now a house we were interested in has sold before we had a chance to view it. The garden has taken something of a back seat, though benign neglect seems to suit it. The cold snap means that we have peak aquilegia at the same time as the first roses and sweet rocket as well as peonies. Birds don’t seem to have done so well as last year. Despite a lot of territory marking and mating behaviour, there have been very few fledglings – some blue tits and sparrows, one single starling and a robin.

    a flower bed with aquilegias and foxgloves

    Perhaps they are all late. The frogs were very late this year, fortunately missing the frost, and now we have a lot of tadpoles and newts. Usually blackbirds and magpies demolish loads of them, but they haven’t done so this year, and we could be in for something biblical when they leave the pond! The swallows and house martins were very late arriving too, but they are making up for lost time, and the swifts are here in force. It is allowed to be summer now.

    starlings practising flying

  • The Stone Age Jen Hadley

    Published by Picador Poetry


    I wrote last time about feeling like ‘a person’ through connections to place and community, and through the ways we communicate with them remember them and draw close. Jen Hadfield has a neurodivergent experience of being a person, and in The Stone Age she explores this. This is particularly fascinating to me, as my daughter was recently diagnosed as autistic. This has meant a radical reinterpretation of her history and current situation, and The Stone Age has provided an excellent commentary on the process.
    Whereas the thrust of my thinking has been to expand my perception beyond the filters humans tend to impose on life, focussing not just on the human, but on the specific set of humans we recognise as ‘our people’, Hadfield struggles with the experience of having very few filters at all. Information about the world enters her mind in such a rush that it takes time to process:

    the world is always 
hurrying me along the headrush
heavens dirl round my anchor
see your lives flare
		and softly fade
but while you press me for my 
answer
	I’m still considering
Your first question

    Human communication is sometimes baffling to her – she describes feeling as if she is under an umbrella (Umbrella) and everyone else is out in the rain, breathing an atmosphere that would drown her, or broadcasting feelings like clanging bells, overwhelming her with incomprehensible alarm peals (Oyea). Yes, says my daughter, Like that.


    Valuable as this is to me, and maybe many other people, it would be inappropriate to simply mine this book for human interest. Hadfield uses this unfiltered, uncategorised experience of the world to produce stunning and original poetry. Limpet divorces our language from its usual human references to neediness or greed. A limpet becomes a whirling dynamic purposeful creature ‘an introvert/tornado —- in an ease of gypsy skirts’ who matches her shell to its rostrum, locks itself deliberately into place. Landscape in Dolmen is not the observed, in spite of its arresting opening:
    Standing Stone, let’s
    Talk about
    You!

    Dolmen, Jen Hadfield

    but an observer, saying –
    humankind
    are brief, soft
    fireworks, prone
    to go off at a moment’s
    notice

    and in Gyö the usual romantic presentation of landscape as a metaphor for human emotional states, (as indeed it was in my poem which I posted last time) is reversed, as the Gyö uses as emotions as metaphors for facets of its own existence:
    I say rage is a cold
    cliff; longing, a skerry. Pleasure is a kelp-hung arch, glittered
    constantly by the licking of the wave.

    I found reading this book to be like looking at a mirror-image of my take on the human place in the world, which has a particular fascination, but it is so much more than that. Hadfield’s use of language is wide-ranging and adventurous but highly crafted, and a particular delight. Shetlandic words are used without comment or gloss, binding the poems closely to their home-place. There are some quirky uses of punctuation in this book, and unusual layouts and fonts, which I didn’t quite get until I tried to quote the first poem here. They work not only on a visual (rather than cognitive) level, but also in a kinetic way, as the labour of reproducing them on the page conveyed meaning I hadn’t grasped. Jen Hadfield is a multi-faceted, gifted artist and poet, and this book is a must-read.



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