BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer


Poetry


  • Stirling’s makar

    Stirling installed its first Makar on Friday – Magi Gibson. She is a really good poet, and a great teacher and I think she will do a lot to encourage people to read and write poetry.
    The ceremony took place in the stunningly beautiful Holy Rude Church in Stirling. Almost all the poets I could think of in Stirling were there, except Richie and Steph and Megan, plus councillors, library staff and the Literary Society. The turn out was really impressive, which I hope is a good sign.
    Ruari Watson introduced Magi, and Magi read her poems – a wide variety of her work, some feminist and radical, some personal,some moving and vivid, some less so. Then some children from Bannockburn Primary read their poems – which were very much better than the average. I’d say that those two will be people to watch later on, except that at eight the most intelligent children write the best, and you can’t say which way their intelligence will take them.
    And then there was tea and elegant little cakes, carrot cake and fruit slices and little tartlets the size of thimbles with three blueberries on. And I sloped off into the drizzle and went home.


  • all gone quiet

    It’s cold. It hasn’t snowed much to complain about here, we’re too close to sea level, but the three and a half snowflakes that did fall are still sitting among the snowdrops and fennel stems because the ground is too cold and hard to melt them. I’m putting together a sequence of Irish poems into a collection called Rushlight. There are more of them than I realised.
    All the sick people here are getting better – the grand-daughter is even well enough to begin pinching food from other kids’ plates at nursery. The house is gradually becoming less silted up with redundant paperwork, books, utensils that might be useful one day and invoices for things we no longer possess. I even started gardening again, until the snow came back, and now the ground is too hard.
    Meantime the rest of the country seems to have totally seized up.


  • the fence is steaming

    The sky was clear this morning, but the pond didn’t look frozen, so I was surprised to find the grass crunching under my feet and the greenhouse frozen shut. In spite of the sun the thermometer says it’s -2C, and the fence, which faces east is steaming gently. There was a flight of geese overhead – I wish I could identify them from their calls as the experts do, but I can’t -and the sparrow colony is moving in to pick up the seed that the blue-tits and coal tits scatter from the feeder.
    Inside the house things are slow. Everybody but me seems to be just a bit below par and out of sorts, but we are still making progress with sorting out that mountains of junk we have accumulated over the past year. The makeover season seems to have started in the village and there are two lots of tradesmen parked outside the house (nothing to do with us, though).
    Meantime I have no less than sixteen poems under construction, and I’m going back for another one I have finished three times now, but still needs something – thoughts about bitterns, probably. Naomi’s godmother told me once that when she came to the village in the sixties there were bitterns in the reed-beds. Not any more there aren’t.
    Also Recusant got a hell of a shove just before Christmas. It’s going to be a very interesting thing to do. It’s going to focus on time, and have about six different layers. I’m glad about this. Front row had an item about two novelists who have just produced novels about archaeologists, so I was definitely needing a different look!


  • family stuff

    Work seems to be grinding slowly to a halt. I get distracted by Christmas shenanigans (our village Christmas lunch and carols, catching up with friends before we get too busy, shopping, cooking, cleaning —)and also by family stuff. We have one daughter at home, and her erstwhile flat-mate staying for a while, and a grand-daughter not far away who wants to play a lot. Plus a vast extended family who are moving into Facebook along with the poets I like to keep up with.
    So there’s not much new work going on. About four poems started, another three in prospect, and a short story called Lithic Flake. But mostly I’m reading, and I’ve come across some excellent new fiction – Sue Gee, John Banville, Stevie Davies. They have given me a lot of ideas for Recusant, which is going to be a more multi-layered and multi-centred novel than Saracen Woman ever was, and is going to let me put in some more of the things I’ve learned from poetry.
    Poetry is strugglng. I seem to be reading more rhetoric about it than poems, which can’t be right.Hugh Macdiarmid is a discovery though. His Lallans poetry (despite the neologisms and obscurity) is so much better than the English. It is more direct, more simple, and so can carry so much more than more writerly stuff. This seems counter-intuitive. Perhaps it suits his mind-set better, or perhaps using a familiar culture he is able to imply more without stridency.


  • Northwords Now

    The new edition finally got here, and I have copies for my mother and my mother-in-law. Sally Evans and I share a page, which makes me feel very honoured, and we feature on the front cover, which impresses me! It’s a very well-produced magazine, and has been one of my favourites for the last couple of years. At this moment,when it has just reached its tenth number, the editor, Rhoda Michael, has just stepped down, and I’d like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to her.
    A voice for the creative work going on in the Highlands was always going to be a desirable thing, but making it a free news-sheet available through libraries and bookshops was a stroke of genius. It makes good poetry and fiction an accessible community activity without the temptation to dumb down.
    Plus Rhoda was always lovely to work for. I am sure I will miss her, but her successor, Jon Miller, seems fine too, and I wish him every success.


  • Northwords Now

    The new edition of Northwords Now is out, and though I haven’t seen a copy yet, I am assured that four of my poems are in it – Naming the Autumn, The Voice of the Carnyx, Hekla’s Country, and April.


  • One Leaf, One Link

    On Friday I went to the launch of the anthology created by the One Leaf, One link project in Perth. It was run by an organisation called Plus, a user-led mental health service funded by the NHS. The project ran for over a year, and produced a tree hung with leaves created in all sorts of different media,by school-children, pensioners, support workers and clients, friends and well-wishers, and poems which were mounted on hand-made paper, and beautifully displayed.

    At the end of the project an anthology was been created by Jackie Proctor, the project leader. It will be sold in Perth library in aid of the work of Plus. It has Walking on Water in it, on a page of blue and white marbled paper she chose for it.
    This was the book that was launched on Friday.It was a lovely occasion. Margaret Gillies-Brown, whom I knew from the Callander Poetry Festival, was there, and there were speeches, well-deserved tributes to those who had been involved, a song by a local primary school, and some very good chocolate cake, iced in red and with autumn leaves on it.

    I have thought for a long time – that art therapy needs to have genuine artistic aspirations and respect for production values to have any value as either art or therapy. Workshop anthologies sometimes don’t reflect this – they can be rather poor quality and rely on loyalty from the friends and relations of those participating for their success. But not this one. Jackie’s vision and craftsmanship have produced a book that is lovely to handle as well as beautiful to look at.


  • new work

    Today I started work planning the new novel. I thought I would give myself a break and spend some time just doing poetry and short stories, but no. I appear to have a novel compulsion, and I’m going to give in. It is going to be called Recusant, at least at the moment, though as it has already had three working titles in its short and flickering life I don’t see that lasting. It is going to be set in Scotland and in the present day, which is something of a relief after all the historical research I had to do last time. It’s going to have music in it, because I can’t do any more art, and archaeology, and wildlife. And it is going to feature one of my favourite characters from a story I wrote two years ago which got rejected a lot.

    There is a poetry project going on too, which I will talk more about as it happens, both here and on the Lúcháir blog, about Scotland and Ireland, the links between them, the shared traditions, the common history, the things that divide and separate, and my own journey from my Irish past to my Scottish present.


  • poetry in the garden

    We just had a wonderful weekend in Callander at Sally and Ian King’s Poetry in the Garden Festival. I notice a fair degree of cynicism about festivals in some quarters – Susan Hill is really bitter about them, but this one would revive the most jaded publisher. There were about fifty poets all reading over the three days. Some of them are in groups like Clylevlom and Onya Wick, but most were individual performances. There were young poets, old poets, Gaelic poets, Scots poets, English poets, some writing in dialect, some in translation. We had a poetry and jazz session, exhibitions from publishers, and a discussion on poetry and fiction. We met up with old friends and made new ones. We walked around the town, enjoyed Sally’s garden, bought books from the shop, and ate a tremendous amount of lovely food.
    And get this. The whole festival was free. No-one making money out of it at all. It was just for the love of poetry and friendship.
    All I can say is, if poetry in Scotland survives the credit crunch, climate change and cultural meltdown we seem to be going through, we’ll all have Sally and Ian to thank.


  • migraines and such

    Not much has been happening because I have had the world’s worst migraine. Research into this phenomenon implies that it can be triggered by computers, bright lights, noises, perfumes, heat, stuffy atmospheres, dehydration, humidity, food, (any kind of food), food additives, some sorts of medication, illness, shock and anxiety. Nobody has actually cited breathing while female, but it surely can’t be long.

    I will be reading at Sally and Ian King’s fabulous Poetry in the Garden Festival in Callendar on Saturday evening, 6th September. You can find out more about this three day poetry party at the Poetry Scotland website – see links.



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