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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer


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  • Unboxed

    sunset from Cathkin Brae
    Sunset from Cathkin Braes

    This was pretty much the last day that went to plan, Midsummer’s Eve. We went to watch the sunset, and it was rather lovely, in spite of the midges. And then we both got covid. Two trips and a birthday party had to be cancelled, we had several days of headaches, exhaustion and bad cold symptoms, and one trip to A&E, fortunately without lasting harm, though the the after effects linger – a poor sense of smell in my case, a wobbly voice in my husband’s. Bad timing all round, but we are past the worst.

    And finally, the bookshelves have been installed in the new library, and all the books are unboxed.

    library shelves full of books. A striped chair in front
    The nature library
    oak library shelves against a dark blue wall. Heavy steps in front
    the literature library

    It doubles as a chillout space for when family life is too noisy or hectic, and I hope it will be used for jigsaw puzzles and board games, editorial meetings and geopoetics discussions.But best of all, all the books are now where I can find them, and I can start on some of the reviews and research I have been planning.


  • Good Country Doctoring

    While I’ve been doing the research for the revised version of The Charm of Nine Herbs, I’ve been coming across some interesting anomalies. Sometimes it seems as if academics and enthusiasts are talking about medicine as if it was one practice, when it appears that in the past there were two entirely separate philosophies about health and healing. This comes up when we read about the ‘wise woman’ theory about the persecution of witches, or the role of the church in medicine, or the very muddled attitudes of scholars to the medical practices of the past.

    The first I’ve called ‘good country doctoring’. The phrase came up in a biography of the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, who lived in Kentucky from 1941 until his death in 1968. He had a complicated medical history, made more complicated by the prejudice of the monastery (which Merton mostly endorsed) against expensive specialist medical services, relying instead on the local practitioners. This is the traditional nursing care we all practice and take for granted – paracetamol for a headache or a high temperature, Vick rubbed on the chest for a cough, dock leaves on a nettle sting and so on. Before the rise of professional doctors, this was all most people had, and they would rely on the knowledge and expertise (which could be extensive) of family and neighbours to provide what was needed. Stitching up wounds, complicated surgery or delivering babies might have needed more, but was still often dealt with in the community. Knowledge was traditional and adapted to the locality and the lifestyle of patients, and probably every woman and most men knew enough to get by. Some would clearly have been better than others – more patient, more observant, more interested perhaps, and though some might have a local reputation for being good nurses or midwives, there were very little reliance on professionals at this level. A lot of the ‘wise woman’ traditional herbal knowledge is of this sort, and is now covered by the study of ethnobotany.

    The second part is really where the text books start. For the most part, sick people who were carefully nursed, then as now, either got well or died, but when there would be something new, or complicated or more critical than average, you had to deal with specialists. These might be either learned people ‘doctors’ or people with a particular gift, whom I am going to call ‘healers’ because I want to avoid getting into discussions about witches and shamans and things which are more precise than I want to be.

    Learned people had access to books and authorities like Galen, or medical schools like the one at Salerno. In the early Middle Ages these were mostly in monasteries, and monks would share their learning as part of their duties of hospitality to strangers and care for the poor. One consequence of this was that monks were constantly being distracted from the monastic life by the demands of wealthy patrons, and St Bernard of Clairvaux in particular was very clear that this should not happen. Stephen Pollington asserts in his book Leechcraft that he forbade them to engage in medicine at all, but this is not the case. As well as the detriment to the life of the monastery, Bernard was concerned that his monks should not have a more privileged life than the poor communities around them. Some of the remedies recommended by these authorities were exotic and expensive, and Bernard says that monks should restrict their treatments to ‘green herbs such as the poor have’.

    Dorothy Hartley in Food in England writes of a priest dealing with ‘diabolic posession’ by diagnosing ‘self neglect, starvation and feebleness’, and recommending good food, rest and a hot night-time drink. She says ‘ One does notice that the simpler the household, the simpler the medical usage. It is in later more complicated communities that we get the fantastically complicated remedies; and the more wealthy the patient, the more likely he is to die of his expensive treatment.‘ (p230).

    I have written in my essay By the Book (you can find a link to it on the non-fiction page) about later developments in knowledge of herbs and understanding of medicine, but this two tier treatment survived into the Victorian age. In Jane Eyre Jane is treated by an ‘apothecary’ while the Reeds consult a ‘surgeon’. And it still survives in the USA, where people who cannot afford the usual medical bills may turn to herbalists whose remedies are cheaper.

    But the ‘magical’ or spiritual element of healing hasn’t gone away either. In a fascinating book called Ireland’s Hidden Medicine by Rosarie Kingston, the Irish tradition of the person ‘with a cure’ is discussed. It’s quite a specific thing, a gift, and it isn’t usually rewarded with money. Other cultures have more developed traditions of rituals or magical powers. These cures aren’t something you can learn, and they often imply contact with ‘powers’ or supernatural agencies. Healers can appear within religious traditions and be accepted by them, or alongside them and be mistrusted. There may be an overlap between the herbal nursing knowledge and magical practice, depending on the culture, or the two processes might be quite separate, even antagonistic.

    My problem, disentangling the academic from the practical in my understanding of The Charm of Nine Herbs, is to decide what sort of healing we are looking at. Clearly, the eclectic mix of references to Woden and quotations from the Bible implies that the compiler of the document thought he was writing medical notes rather than theology. He was gathering up anything he thought might be useful, regardless of its source. But he has a much wider understanding of the healing process than we have and that is an interesting thought.

    I am also interested in applying the difference between the ‘learned’ and the ‘gifted’ to poetry, and seeing how this wider understanding of ‘healing’ can work there too.


  • Ceasing Never

    Keat’s poem The Grasshopper and the Cricket has the line ‘the poetry of earth is ceasing never’, and much as I have suffered badly with the post-book lull since The Well of the Moon came out, I’m beginning to feel more as if the poetry of earth hasn’t stopped here either. Preparing the poetry conversation about poetry and Geopoetics with Helen Boden has helped to get my mind back into gear, (you can find a recording of it here) and the fact that our new library is under construction so that I will soon be able
    to find all my books has given me a sharper focus on how I want my work to develop.

    I’m looking to make, and to write about poetry that centres the earth – the landscape where we live, and all the creatures who live there, not the occasional urban visitor. A poetry that is in conversation with the earth rather than commenting on it. And I’m looking to write some essays about both sides of that proposition – both ‘place writing’ and poetics – the philosophy and practice of earth-based poetry. The first of these has now been added to my non-fiction page. It’s a revised and extended version of a draft I sent out with my most recent newsletter and you can find it here.

    In the middle of that, my own personal ‘walking the territory’ practice, the herbs, the knowledge of how to grow and use them, the traditional practices and beliefs, the connections across cultures and history. I am working on a revised and annotated version of my translation of The Charm of Nine Herbs. The history of herbal medicine has a lot to teach writers about attitudes to language, landscape and indigenous knowledge, and it keeps my poetry grounded.

    strawberry pot, and new chamomile border

  • My Chemical Romance Tour

    There are a lot of people renewing their youth this weekend, as well as a lot of people who discovered The Black Parade for the first time only recently, because the long-awaited tour by the band My Chemical Romance is finally happening. My daughter is among them, but also, to my surprise, a lot of people I follow on social media for poetry purposes. I hope you all had fun – here’s a poem I wrote for you back in 2009!

    Orpheus Plays 2: Battlechant of the MCRmy


    He has never seen the venue from this side.
    Behind the amps, behind the rocksteady
    cordon in liveried t-shirts, he has not seen
    the broken vinyl, the congealed sweat
    that drips like greasy rain, advertisements
    for help-lines for the drugged, abused or disappeared.

    From his side, in the stagelight bubble’s
    liquid pulsing, he sees glitterflashes,
    a snowfall of shredded tickets, and the hands
    waving when he waves, love graffiti
    in tattoos and eyeliner, skull mittens,
    fingers making horns. He hears the screaming,
    singing in the pauses, maenad chanting
    MCRmy! What is your profession?

    He says he thinks of them as family.
    They tell him how his music saved their lives.
    He gives them songs of alienation,
    disillusionment, despair, death, pain and hell.
    They sing too. They already know those words.
    He tells them to be gentle to each other.
    He comes downstage, takes the mike and shouts
    I want to hear you mother-fuckers scream!

    It’s part of a sequence called Eurydice Rising and appeared in my first book, Wherever We Live Now (Red Squirrel Press) back in 2011. I still have a few copies—–


  • PoetryCon StAnza 2022

    My daughter refers to StAnza as my PoetryCon. As in Convention, like ComicCon which features so often in the Big Bang theory. There’s not so much cosplay, though somebody did once enter the Slam wearing a powdered periwig, (my daughter begs to differ – ‘You ALL dress like poets’, she says) no film stars and very little merch except books, but she is right. Though she says it’s more nuanced than that. She is a comic artist herself, and says that StAnza is not so much like the big Cons, where readers go to see the re-enactments of their favourite comics, more like one called Thought Bubble, which is where comic artists go to hear their favourite artists talk about how to write or draw comics, and engage with the function comics perform in the wider worlds of art and society. As well as displays and panels, book signings and sales, there are outreach events within local communities, and a strong grass roots presence.

    This describes the much-loved atmosphere of StAnza as we have come to know it. I have been to other festivals, and I do get the impression that they are places people drop into for the highlight events, and the big names, and then maybe tack on something attractive that is happening in the day or two they are there. That is not how StAnza works. For years I have been trying to write a StAnza-based parody of Christy Moore’s Lisdoonvarna because I can’t think of anything else that comes quite so close:

    Everybody needs a break
    Climb a mountain or jump in a lake —

    We go there and they come here.
    Some jet off to … Frijiliana,
    But I always go to Lisdoonvarna.

    We go to St Andrews. We go for the whole thing. We book tickets recklessly and we go to everything we can until we fall over. You can see people dashing between venues to get from one event to the next, and the B&Bs and pizza places and coffee shops are full of poets all the time. The Byre Theatre is a hub,

    Ramble in for a pint of stout,
    you’d never know who’d be hangin’ about!

    Well, you get tea and scones, during the day, or coffee and shortbread, though there is usually a lot of alchohol drunk later – and you get the gossip. This year, after a two year hiatus, it was like a dam bursting. We had a LOT of catching up to do!

    Of course the big names are there. I’ve seen Jackie Kay, Don Paterson, Caroline Forche, Mark Doty, Gillian Clarke, Moya Cannon, Seamus Heaney and John Burnside. I’ve seen poets from all over the world. I’ve seen poetry films, comics, installations, performance poetry, music. The big name poets don’t just perform, they hold workshops and round tables, panel discussions and protests. They do sign books, but you can also find them hanging about in the Byre. There are plenty of book sales – Innes Bookshop during StAnza is the only place you can see poetry bookshelves raided and empty like a late night bakery stall, and the Poets Market is a valuable lifeline and showcase for small presses and pamphleteers.

    But there is also a strong grassroots presence. The independent Scottish presses are there. The developments in newer poetry are represented and showcased alongside the familiar and established trends. Fledgling presses have the opportunity to test themselves against the heavyweights, and poets who might have found themselves at a distance from livelier centres get a chance to hear what’s going on and contribute. We compare notes, and collaborate, develop new projects and make new connections. When I came to Scotland there was what we called a ‘Scottish cringe’ – a feeling that Scottish culture was provincial, nostalgic, undeveloped – and that you needed to attract the attention of London to make an impact. I honestly think that has gone now, and events like StAnza, with its emphasis on encouraging Scottish, Gaelic and Shetlandic alongside English, and its confident opening of doors to a multi-cultural perspective, has had a lot to do with it. A tall tree needs deep and wide-spreading roots, and here is where we grew them. One performance poet said of StAnza, ‘You took us seriously when we didn’t know how to take ourselves seriously’.

    If I felt that this dimension was lacking this year, I’d have to make a few qualifications. Clearly covid took a flamethrower to most of our assumptions and habits. Long-term planning after last year’s wonderfully light-footed and ingenious digital version couldn’t really start while new variants and changes of regulations were happening all the time, and applying for funding in such a challenging environment must have been a nightmare. You couldn’t predict how many people would be able to come, or feel confident in sharing spaces, especially as a lot of us aren’t exactly spring chickens, and travel was difficult and unpredictable even before the Ukraine situation happened. Also – and this took me by surprise – we had looked forward to being back among our tribe so much and we were so excited to be there, that the experience became intense and overwhelming. We weren’t used to being around so many people. We weren’t used to travelling. We lost things, forgot to pack things, locked our keys in our hotel rooms (just me? I don’t think so!). We got tired and emotional. My daughter used to talk about ‘con drama’ – a cocktail of too many people, too many events, not enough food and less sleep – and we all felt it. Some of us started cutting events earlier than usual, some went home early, a few of us got ill and had to stay in bed instead of getting into the things we’d come for. It wasn’t the same.

    But then, how could it be? Things were inevitably going to change, and if we felt understandably disappointed, we need to think of new possibilities. But I would like to think we could appreciate what we had without being simply obstructive. This year had some real gems of highlights. My favourites were poetry from Vahni Capildeo, Hannah Lowe and JL Williams, discussions about Modernism and TS Eliot from Paul Muldoon and Sandeep Parmer, the lecture about the discussion of migration and human rights in poetry by Mona Arshi. Other people loved Robin Robertson’s reading, William Letford’s verse novel work in progress and the discussion of erasure poety and narrative by Alice Hiller and Gail McConnell. We had the extra curricular delights of gulls, the beach, pastries at the poetry breakfasts, fish suppers and reunion pizzas with people you only see at StAnza. We hung out in the Byre as usual, much to the bafflement of the staff who kept warning us the bar was closed. It was lovely.

    Feedback questionnaires are going to be online this year, so we missed Annie’s ‘fill in your phones and turn off your questionnaires’, and I will have to think very carefully about how I raise some of the issues on my mind. I know the hard-working and invariably courteous and helpful StAnza staff and volunteers pulled off their usual marvel, and I want to give them my unqualified thanks and appreciation.

    We will definitely be back next year, with our blank notebooks and empty suitcases for all the new poetry. Floreat StAnza!


  • Snow

    hawthorn trees and brambles, covered in snow

    I was not expecting this today. Just enough for a frosting, and now with a bright clear sky giving us more light than we seem to have had for weeks. This is the haggard behind the house, open ground that was turned over back in the summer, and then left. I hope it goes on being left. There is ivy on those hawthorns, which were thick with berries in the autumn, and mugwort and plantain and bistort growing through the heavy clods of turned earth. I am interested to see what else will grow if it goes on being neglected, but I have the feeling that it will be grassed and planted with the trees the developer seems to favour – flowering cherry, lime, whitebeam. Not that these are too bad – they all have wildlife-friendly blossom and the whitebeam has berries, but I bet the grass will be mowed within an inch of its life.

    This garden is wider than our previous one, but less deep, so the birds on the feeder are closer to us, and they give our garden life and character that it otherwise would miss. House sparrows and tree sparrows seem to live alongside each other harmoniously, and we aren’t too bothered by the rampaging city pigeons we used to see, though we do have a few wood pigeons, as you can see here.

    wood pigeon (right) and goldfinch (left) on a hawthorn tree

    The goldfinch shows the scale! We have a few chaffinches too, and occasional dunnocks and robins, and coal tits, great tits and blue tits. Once there was a small flock of long-tailed tits clinging to the fatballs, clustering like barnacles on a ship’s hull, and giving their soft sweet contact calls, as if they were pensioners on a day out: ‘are you there? Are you keeping up? have we lost Annie? no, there she is’.

    There are starlings too, but I miss the blackbirds and thrushes. When the berries were first ripe they came in over a weekend, but they seem to have moved on for the most part. I hear them on the woody path, or in the park, but not here. I’ve heard wrens too, but they are shy and secretive, and I’m not surprised. We have a lot of cats on this estate.

    The big miss is the geese. Winter does not seem like winter without the blanket of cloud, quilted with the skeins of pink-foots and greylags going over, the aimless swirls of them going to roost, the dedicated squadrons coming south in Octoberr, going north in March. I am looking for different markers for the slow opening of the lengthening day here, and yesterday I found them. The first long, tenderly pink rhubarb

    a bowl of stewed forced rhubarb on a table

    and the marmalade oranges. About now, my mother-in-law used to ring around all her daughters asking ‘Have you made your marmalade yet?’ and we would discuss recipes and the quality of oranges and the price of sugar. I miss this a lot. She made it in great quantities every year, much of it given to family and friends or sold at a church fete. I don’t make nearly so much, because I’m the only one in our house who likes it, but nothing else tastes so good as homemade marmalade, so here it is

    a preserving pan full of simmering marmalade

    I have taken few photos of the Place of the Fire so far, kept close to the house by weather, strangeness, and a bad knee, but as I learn the rhythms of this new place, I am discovering the places with things to tell me, and learning when to take my camera out.

    Snowy garden showing the back fence, with seedling birch, snakebark maple, buddleia and sedum

  • Last Post Before Christmas

    A holly tree in sunlight, ivy growing on it

    This was not going to be the last post before Christmas. There was going to be something a bit more festive and encouraging next week, with maybe a Christmas tree on it, or the gingerbread house we made with the grandchildren, and this was going to be more meditative and grounded. However, I have been overtaken by events, and I know that I will be too busy to be back here before New Year.

    I have been casting up accounts of how the year went, and it’s been quite momentous in several ways, and much has changed since last year. After many years of caring for my daughter, a change in her diagnosis meant a very different outlook and prospects for her, and we have been working through the implications not only for her, but for all of us. Things are more stable now than they have been for a long time, and the house move I’ve been writing about since September was a big part of that.

    The house has been a big change. It isn’t only the physical differences, the higher ground, the westerly milder weather, a landscape that is more definitively urban, a new house rather than one over a hundred years old, it’s the community. People here are much more extraverted, decorating houses more lavishly for Halloween and Christmas, more talkative in the street when they are out walking, more demonstrative about things they like or don’t like. It’s a younger community, by and large, and there are more children because it’s a new family centred estate, and many more dogs, because people typically moved in just before lockdown, and they all got dogs, or cats. But the dogs are mostly well-behaved, because you know there would be consequences if they weren’t. I am not at all a dog person, but I find I am considerably calmer around them now than I ever expected to be.

    Then there was The Well of the Moon, which came out in June.

    Front Cover of the Well of the Moon, with a feverfew plant and a crescent moon

    There was a time when I didn’t think I could write this book, and a time when I wondered if I could publish it. It had some very personal stuff in it, and some wild experiments. And yet it has had more lovely things said about it than any of my books, and I have sold more copies. It launched at St Mungo’s Mirrorball, which is an enormous privilege, and I had the pleasure of reading from it, not in my home town exactly, but in New Brighton, close enough that two of my siblings were able to be there.

    COP 26 was a significant moment. Not as big a turning point as we might have wished, nor producing the results we needed, exactly, but it did demonstrate to the powers slowing us down that most people need more action, bigger changes and deeper understanding, and more of us are taking action to see that it happens, and to make changes in our own lives.

    There have been losses this year, the father of one of my children’s oldest friends, William Bonar, the brilliant poet in his own right and wonderful supporter of other poets, and a friend of more than thirty years ago, to whom I dedicated The Well of the Moon. Other people have had more significant bereavements and illness and anxiety has touched us all. We are exhausted, I think, and frustrated at our apparent powerlessness, but we are still here, stronger for the bonds we built over social media, knowing more about who our friends are and what they do for us. Instead of a Christmassy evergreen and starlight poem, I’ll finish with one set on the 14th January, where a poet calls Ausonius is missing his absent friend Paulinus, (caught up the other side of the Roman Empire) in which I am thinking of you all. Thank you for all the friendship, the pictures and messages on social media, and especially all the poetry!

    For Distant Friends

    It is the feast of Felix, and though the snow

    makes roads a penance, I am translating

    a springtime poem from a long dead man

    in Italy. He serves a shrine to Felix, ransoms slaves,

    sends loving poems to his teacher, missing him.

    The teacher comments, ‘He answered many things,

    but did not say that he would come’.

    My friends, I can’t come either. More

    than winter weather, bad roads, the fall of empires

    keeps us apart, but like Paulinus, I send you

    poems of love, of memory, of debts I owe you,

    hope for better times, a promise to keep you

    close to my heart, although I cannot come.

    Happy Christmas!

    holly seedling

  • The House that Says Yes

    There was a lot to love about the Territory of Rain, and about the house we lived in, and there were many happy times and lovely things that happened there, but we lived in a house that said no. And not now. Not here. Whatever you did, it fought back. This house, in the Place of the Fire, doesn’t have the history or the character, and in terms of square feet of space, it’s actually smaller, which surprised us. But it says yes.

    craft cupboard, with sewing equipment, against a wall with pictures and pinboard

    It says yes to room to write, and sew and learn about herbs.

    bookshelves stacked with books and files, and cupboard doors to hide stationery. To the right a window with a paraffin lamp.

    It says yes to books, and quiet spaces to read, and room for lots of chairs for the family when they come over. It says yes to space for guests to sleep over, though our first two visitors were still sharing their room with a lot more boxes than they would like. A lot of other stuff has come easier – thge park, and lovely places to walk, getting access to our doctor’s surgery, and membership of the local library. Some things not so much – public transport is a bit hit and miss, and I’m only just getting back to the point where I can walk to the nearest bus stop.

    But the kitchen! I am sure we bought the house because of the beautiful serene colour it was painted – somewhere between sage and olive – but the previous owners had free-standing units, which they took, so for a while we were short of both storage and worktops. Yesterday we fixed that:

    Rustic kitchen island with three drawers, shelves at either end and a two door cupboard between them

    Now there is a good solid worktop, slightly lower than the average, to accommodate my shorter than average height, and a larder cupboard which holds all the cooking ingredients I need to get back to my usual baking and preserving. I’m going to make the first batch of bread this afternoon.

    The garden is a slightly different prospect – it doesn’t say no, exactly, but it says yes, but, and yes when. There is more usable growing space than I first thought, but the soil is very heavy clay. I have created a working plan, and I will make a few sun maps to see where the light falls – it is much less overshadowed than the old garden, and faces due west, so we are not going to be short of sun for the mediterranean herbs, but the drainage will certainly have to be improved. The garden seems to have its preferences, too. Beside the shed it says chickweed and nettle (good signs, both of them, for fertility and goodness locked in the soil). There is a spot which seems to be saying ‘elecampane’, which I love, but haven’t grown for years, because it’s enormous. And the front lawn definitely says dandelion, which we might have to argue about. On the whole, however, the conversations I have with this new home are almost all good ones. This is a house that says ‘yes’.


  • 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



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