BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Uncategorized

Make It New

This is the desk on which I wrote my Masters dissertation more than thirty years ago. I had a friend with a word processor who typed it up for me – that’s how much things have changed. I had very poor typing skills and no computer skills at all, and honestly thought that computers would have no impact on my life in any way.

Anyway, this desk was bought with my very last salary as a teacher, and sat in a corner, bruised and battered and looking very neglected. During lockdown 2 I finally sanded and varnished it and ordered a new insert which my husband put in for me, because my hands are too shaky for knives as sharp as all that. It will never look new, or even like a cherished antique, but it looks as though I love it, and I do.

This second phase of level 4 has been very hard, but in the way that mending a broken leg is hard. Tough as it is, it is possible to see strength and flexibility returning, recovering lost joy in free movement. Through it I have had to come to a deeper understanding of what inspires me, what I’m able to do, and, crucially, what I’m not. I had spread myself very thin, tried to follow so many different enthusiasms and causes, and battled with doubt and despair more than I allowed myself to notice. But this paring down of life and opportunity made me rest (goodness, that’s hard!) and look at where my heart is, the work that gives me satisfaction and joy, and how to deepen it so that I do it as well and as thoroughly as it deserves.

But it reminded me of how much love and joy there is in my life, in my kitchen, my garden, the territory of rain, in the writing about place and poetry that delights me, the friends who strengthen me and the people who so kindly tell me they like what I do. I feel a bit like my desk, sanded down a bit, and refurbished – made new.

There will be new poetry next year – some of mine, and at least two new books by poets I’m excited to be working with, a fresh look for the newsletter (more of that later) and more reviews for the blog, and maybe a workshop or two. Plus territory pictures and herbs as usual, that isn’t stopping any time soon. I do hope you will join me!

December 9, 2020
Back on the Road

And a grey damp chilly road it is too this morning. Heavy rain is forecast, and frost by the end of the week, so we went for a walk while we could. There were crows and magpies in the oystercatcher field and deer browsing in the field below the Craigs, so winter has definitely arrived. A skein of geese flew along the Ochils, looking like nothing more than a fast-moving wisp of cloud until the leaders caught the sun, then lifted and disappeared over the brow of the hill.

Gardening is over for the season, apart from the cabbages and kale in the greenhouse, and the sparrows are back in the hedges, squabbling for places on the birdfeeders. The kitchen is full of jam, pickles and mincemeat and I have made the Christmas puddings, though we still don’t know who will be here to eat them with us. The rainbows we decorated our windows with at the start of the first lockdown have gone, and we are replacing them with Advent lights and decorations – this winter will need all the sparkle it can get!

Lockdown has hit everyone hard, and we are all sick and weary of it, but finally there does appear to be hope on the horizon for the spring, and meanwhile, I have been setting seeds for next year, working on my next collection – not nearly as close to finishing as I thought – thinking about plans for this blog, and for re-engaging with poetry in real life as soon as it is at all possible. I have read some great poetry, and some very inspiring nature writing, and discovered a lot of resources for the next phase – the Nature Library, Emergence Magazine, and the Inkcap newsletter. When I was first online there was a site called Habitat which provided a roundup of all the environmental news – needless to state it soon got overwhelmed by the avalanche of information available, and the demands of keeping up to date with the technology. Journalist Sophie Yeo who runs Inkcap seems to have a much more sustainable model, and provides an excellent service!

And on the poetry front, Colin Bancroft spent his lockdown putting together the amazing resource the Poets Directory. This includes the online magazine 192, and soon, the small press Nine Pens. I’m quite glad to report that, after all this activity supporting other poets, Colin has a pamphlet out himself, published by Maytree Press.

I’m also very pleased to tell you that I will have a a weird little sea poem in the next edition of 192 – another way in which I am back on the road!

November 23, 2020
Political Correctness and Virtue Signalling

This is going to be a bit of a rant, so buckle up.

Rant the first.

I recently unfriended someone on Facebook for posting a snide cartoon mocking political correctness. I don’t do this often – usually I have a three strikes policy, bearing in mind that you can’t always judge tone and context from a single post that might just be there because it’s funny, and that people may have a back story that you need to understand before you wade in, with the assumption that they are simply being abusive. But there are limits.

You have to know that I am quite old. Though most of my memories are from the sixties, the culture I was brought up in was shaped by the austerities and nostalgia of the post war period. I was brought up to be ‘a lady’ – a concept which took a lot of bashing when I became a feminist. But being ‘a lady’ in a working class Liverpool council estate was never going to mean having the right accent, knowing which fork to use in a posh restaurant, or having the vapours if asked to tackle anything that looked like manual labour. The key principle that was dinned into us, at home, at school, in the school stories and the pages of Girl magazine, was that you respected the dignity of everyone you came into contact with, and you never said or did anything that made the people around you feel unwelcome or uncomfortable.

This did not mean you couldn’t complain or protest. My mother was a quiet, shy woman in general, but when she took on teachers, shops giving poor service, council workers or tradesmen who didn’t deliver, she was unstoppable. It didn’t mean you couldn’t speak plainly or bluntly if you needed to. It just meant that to us, good manners was not a polite fiction masking self-serving skullduggery or way to tell the lower orders they were uncivilised. It was a basic requirement of living harmoniously with other people. Using ‘political correctness’ in a derogative way means

a) a way to show someone else they are out of touch or

b) someone doesn’t care how uncomfortable other people are in the conversation.

It signals an intent to bully. I am too old for this. If you want to call it political correctness, go ahead. To me it’s just good manners.

Rant the second.

A plea for virtue signalling. I hear a lot about the normalisation of, for instance, terrorist attacks, politicians going on television lying to people (even when they know we know what the truth is, because they don’t care what we believe), corruption, attacks on the judiciary, abandonment of the rule of law, dependency on foodbanks, homelessness, manipulation of social media. And yet, talking about how people are campaigning to save refugees from unjust deportation, housing the homeless, saving the envoronment, feeding hungry children, protesting about oppression is ‘virtue signalling’. There is an implication that it isn’t a genuine conviction, a moment of compassion, an instinct for kindness and fairness and welcome, it’s just a narcissistic attempt to make other people look bad.

We absolutely need to normalise the good stuff. Marcus Rashford’s Twitter feed this morning is full of small businesses and community groups stepping up to feed the children the Westminster (but not the Welsh or the Scottish) Government has abandoned. When the outrageous charges for settlement certificates for EU citizens, my Twitter feed was full of Scottish people asking if we could crowdfund them. When the lockdown hit, all my social media was full of community groups reaching out to the lonely or the people shut out of work, or children worried by the weirdness of the world.

We need to see this. We need to remind ourselves about who we really are. We need to see that this country is not just the nest of vipers, divided between the arrogant entitled toffs, and the surly embittered plebs that the newspaper industry wants to show us. And we sure as hell need our government to see it. They do not represent us. They are not only lying to us, they are lying about us.

Rant over. Back to robins and poetry and some thoughts about interesting witch books next week!

October 23, 2020
And So Today

And so today, you ask me
What is your life about?
Why are you? What do you mean?
What is your function, what are you for?
And I will have to tell you
about the woodpecker drumming
and the carpet of celandines
below the old railway bridge,
the wrens defending their gardens
in a mad trill of music,
the sourdough bubbling in the kitchen
and the warm smell of soup,
the logbooks stacked beside my chair,
the firelight, a growing poem.

A springtime poem, but this is the mood for today. The world seems to be going to hell in a handcart, and there isn’t anything I can do about it, apart from this. I’m not making any great claim for it, but it isn’t exactly frivolous either. Love grounded in reality is where we need to start from. I’m sending love.

October 6, 2020
Tongues of Fire by Seán Hewitt

Front cover

This book is the one I waited for most anxiously, having read Seán Hewitt’s debut pamphlet Lantern last year. It didn’t disappoint. Right from the opening poem, the quiet, but not at all understated Leaf, you have some idea what you are in for:

For woods are the form of grief
grown from the earth. For they creak.
——
For even in the nighttime of life
it is worth living, just to hold it
Tongues of Fire p. 1

This collection is all about grief, chiefly for the slow death of the poet’s father from cancer, but also the deaths of friends and contemporaries by suicide, and the loss of love. The book is heavy and heartfull with grief, but it is not a sad book. It studies darkness and night, but also light, air and water.

It is essentially a ‘moniage‘ book, a going out into nature to discover wisdom and meaning, and it is full of trees, birds and plants. The poems about wild garlic and St John’s Wort are among my favourites, and I wish I had come across the latter when I did the St John’s wort newsletter! But Oak Glossary

In oak,
essential nouns include soil,
water and time – these are produced
from their elements. Water is a high
and gentle noise of clearest quality
which results from branches dripping
Tongues of Fire p16

and I Sit and Eavesdrop the Trees show the poet entering deeply into the life of other living things, rather than discussing how they figure in our lives. As a gay man in a very Catholic environment, the poet must consciously go ‘outside’ to think about his relationships and sexual identity, and he discovers a place full of secrets, danger and death, but also strength, wisdom and love.

The crux of the book is Hewitt’s ‘versions’ (as opposed to direct translations) of Buile Suibhne, the twelfth century Irish epic about a king who is cursed with madness by a monk, and has to live in the woods among the birds (I can’t find any justification for the assertion that he becomes a bird himself in the translations available to me). Seamus Heaney produced a translation in 1985, and I’ve found it useful to compare the two. Heaney’s Sweeney is a very physical, forceful disruptive man, reacting with violence whenever he is crossed, and rampaging about Ireland

poking his way into hard rocky clefts,
shouldering through ivy bushes
unsettling falls of pebbles in narrow defiles
wading estuaries
breasting summits
trekking through glens.
Sweeney Astray p.10

He winds up in Glen Bolcain, a valley of madmen, where he has to fight for the best of the wild watercress, and he is ‘flailed’ by the thorn bushes where he has to sleep, and battered by falling from branches which don’t bear his weight. He is always on the defensive, getting into fights with people who comment on his plight, and the weight of the poem falls on the loss of the social world he used to inhabit.

Hewitt’s Sweeney is quieter, and more introspective, lonelier and more vulnerable

no matter where I go
my sins follow. First,
the starry frost will fall
at night onto every pool
and me left out in it, straying.

Hewitt focusses on the friendships Sweeney forms first with the madman Fer Caille whom he meets in Britain, and with whom he agrees to protect each other until Fer Caille’s death, and then with the monk Moling, through whom he is healed, and who mourns his death. People have often seen this poem as a clash between an oppressive Christianity, and a more pagan pantheism, but in this version, Hewitt seems to create an reconciliation between the two worldviews, without necessarily giving ascendancy to either.

I find this elsewhere in the book, particularly in the final section – Tree of Jesse and the title poem Tongues of Fire, which is a reflection on the fungus clavariiforme (you can see it on the cover), which he finds in the woods, and also on the Pentecostal tongues of flame. In spite of the close attention to Biblical motifs, it is not exactly clear who or what he asks

for correlation – that when all is done,
and we are laid down in the earth, we might
listen, and hear love spoken back to us.
Tongues of Fire p.69

My own reflections on our relationship to the earth and the question of moniage in particular, will be a long time brewing, but start here. This is a stunning book.

September 25, 2020
Farewell Summer

And just like that, it was gone. Once the ivy is in flower, you know, but the signs were all there. All the flowers in the garden are busy setting seed, and the trees are bright with rowan berries, rose-hips, haws. The last field has been cut and all the small birds have disappeared from the garden after the spilled grain. The skies are cloudier, there’s a brisk westerly wind, and the resident geese are grabbing first dibs on all the good places before the northerners arrive next month.

This is Sherriffmuir, where we went to see the heather.

My big ritual for this time is collecting brambles The haggard is full of them, and I took advantage of the good weather last week. The heavy rain and extended dry periods this year meant that many promising shows of blossom never set fruit at all, the earliest ones had gone over already and birds and wasps have been at the ones they missed. But it has been a generous year and there are lots left, shining with ripeness, making it worth the scratches, the torn jeans, the purple splashes from wrist to elbow. The best berries are always further in, higher up or on the most defiant tangles of thorn, and there seems to be an unholy alliance between bramble and nettle. But I hate to miss it.

It’s an autumn experience that is common to a lot of people and most poets have a blackberry picking poem somewhere. I have one myself as part of my Eurydice Rising sequence from Wherever We Live Now. In northern versions of the story, Orpheus gets Eurydice back, so I used both versions to talk about creativity, and mental illness and the kinds of relationships artists develop with their community. In the Breton romance, King Orfeo, Orpheus leaves the court, distraught after the loss of Eurydice, living wild in the forest, in a sort of shamanic disintegration. One day, he sees the fairy hunt passing, and follows.

The next bit is quite significant. He remembers, ‘I used to do that, long ago’. Hunting was a social marker then, restricted to the nobility, and was seen as a useful contribution to the community, culling deer which might have destroyed crops. Orfeo has rediscovered himself, his humanity, and his role in the community. It is only then that he is able to recognise his lost wife Erodys riding among the fairy host, and to follow it back under the grey stone, into the otherworld.

I decided that the role of hunting, especially as it is is practised nowadays, was not one I wanted to endorse, so I chose blackberry picking as an iconic memory, and a prompt to Orpheus’ recovery of human bonding.

Moniage 1: Orpheus in the Wilderness
Orpheus deserts his post. Her flight
is like a magpie raid on his whole life –
what isn’t gone is broken, pulled apart.
Only the harp goes with him, and he plays
in doorways, under arches, in the space
between the human places. When he sings,
the trees bend down to listen. No-one else will.

He is lost without her, and demented,
follows strange girls home, asks who’s hiding her,
shouts obscenities at those who pass him by.
He hears voices in the dark, and follows them
out into wilder places, to be alone.

He comes on children, picking brambles,
noisy, carefree, quick and neat as birds.
They do not notice him, and go their way
unfrightened, and he hears the women call
them home to breakfast. When they are gone,
the silence stirs him like a changing wind.
He says, “I used to do that, long ago.”

He thinks of berries shining, intact, black,
the small hairs tickling his outstretched palm,
the scratches worn like war wounds, and the brag
of secret places, where there’s loads still left.
That’s when the door opens, the shadowed way
beneath the grey rock, to the other place.

This is Tappoch Broch near Torwood, as otherworldly as the central belt can get! (This will be next week’s post.) My bramble-picking only led me as far as blackberry and apple crumble, and very nice it was, too!

September 10, 2020
Living La Vida Lockdown – the Reset

Being Alive Tim Ingold

Reading this was tough, and I’m not sure how much I got out of it. Ingold says he is an anthropologist not a philosopher, but there was an awful lot of post-phenomenological explanation in it, and though I like some of its assumptions, a lot of it felt like verbal games, played by someone who mostly restricts his vocabulary to the academic.

I like the basic premise that ‘being’ is a verb as much as a noun, and that being alive needs to be seen as a constantly evolving process, not a yes/no question. I like the reminder that we are immersed in the material world, not apart from it, and the detached viewpoint espoused by science is a narrative fiction. I like the reminder that we are as much acted upon as actors in the ‘weave of the world’ (p9), and that our decisions are inherently responsive to the way the world is, rather than self-started.

To perceive and act in the weather-world is to align one’s own conduct to the celestial movements of sun moon and stars, to the rhythmic alternations of night and day and of the seasons, to rain and shine, sunlight and shade. (p132)

Life is a conversation, even at an intra-cellular level (an idea I paraphrase from Colin Tudge’s Secret Life of Trees).

But this book does not touch on the experience of individuality, of boundaries, filters, permissions, preferences, differences, disputes and reconciliations which make up not only our psychology, but even our physical life. Our skins are waterproof. Breathing in requires reflexes. We have to swallow to take in food, and we would rather have the orange than the peel. Marking personal boundaries is common to many living things – plants have prickles and stings, some beetles secrete a vile tasting oil to keep themselves from being eaten, and gulls on a roof ward off other birds getting too close with screaming, lifted wings and menacing lunges. Tim Ingold seems to see naming, the recognition of individual identity, as possessiveness and the desire to dominate. (p160), which seems to me to be a statement of enormous privilege.

Identity can be a fraught issue, just now, and I don’t want to disappear down any of the tempting rabbit holes, but it matters enormously. To belittle ‘identity politics’ is to reduce a person’s arguments to the inconvenience of their demands to be respected as an individual. A black person demanding an end to racism does not want everything to be about being black, he wants to prevent his blackness being the only thing anyone notices. A feminist doesn’t want to spend her life discussing women’s issues, she wants women’s issues to be a factor in the normal functioning of society just as men’s are. Disabled people want accessible venues, not because everything has to be about their disability, but so they like the able-bodied, can think about the rest of their life.

It is fairly difficult for me to acknowledge this, but individual identity is a multi-faceted, rich and complex gift. I come from a tradition where self-sacrifice and self-giving is considered to be noble and generous, and self-assertion is arrogant and really rather vulgar, but often this isn’t how it works. In theory you should be generously poured out in the service of your fellows, in practice you just feel you’ve been laid waste. Thomas Merton wrote in Contemplation in a World of Action – a book clearly influenced by the Nuremberg trials which were happening at the time:

Let us not imagine that this “existing for another” is compatible with perfect love. The alienated man cannot love. He has nothing to give. Nothing is his. The lover is able to give himself completely to another precisely because he is his own to give. He is not alienated. He has an identity. He knows what is his to surrender. The alienated man has no chance to surrender. He has simply been taken over by total control.

(Note the male pronouns. I forgive him because he was living in an all-male community, and with a bitter experience of how it worked but —–).

It isn’t just about exploitation. If you don’t have any sense of yourself as an individual, you can’t get any satisfaction from your activity, and you burn out. You have no realistic assessment whether what you are doing is effective, or whether you are just ticking boxes, so your performance is haphazard at best. You don’t give yourself time to consider whether there is a better way of doing things, or a better person to do it, or if your particular gifts make it more appropriate for you to do something entirely different. Your contribution to community life gets compromised. There is no conversation in entropy.

Identity is important. Boundaries are important. I was thinking a bit about this on the InterlitQ blog last week. Claiming and understanding one’s own identity is vital not just for your own survival, but for the integrity of what you have to share. Barriers are something else, as we see personally and politically. Since I wrote Haggards I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of places in between, edgelands where beings from two adjoining zones can meet, blend, adapt to each other and thrive, listening places, places for translation and transformation. They are places of reciprocity and connection rather than containment and separation. They are places where individuality can become communal, where the weave of the world holds together.

As we come out of lockdown, a three steps forward, two steps back process here in Scotland, I’ll be taking this insight with me.

September 2, 2020
Living La Vida Lockdown – the Books

Not as many as you’d think, but some of the books I’ve been reading have been fabulous. One trend I’ve noticed however – the number of men who are writing about herbs! I’m sure when Haggards came out it was mostly women who liked the herb poems, but lately things seem to be a bit different. I’ll get to Seán Hewitt later, and in another context, but for now, lets look at Kei Miller’s In Nearby Bushes.

‘Nearby bushes’ in Jamaica are not merely undergrowth or shrubbery. They are the equivalent of ‘the forest’ of medieval outlaws, ‘the bush’ in Australia, the back streets of urban estates, the closes of older Edinburgh, the ‘no go’ areas of countries in a state of civil unrest. It was tempting to draw a parallel with my ‘haggards’, especially as Kei Miller discusses issues around forced exile, colonialism, and suppression of indigenous knowledge (including herbal medicine), but as we will see, ‘nearby bushes’ are a darker place. Whereas my haggards and maquis are places of neglect, exile and abandonment, but also sources of resistance and revitalisation, ‘nearby bushes’ are an insight into the ‘shadow’ (in a Jungian sense), of Jamaican culture.
It is the essence of the shadow that it should not be known and understood in itself, but should be spoken of only in line with the expectations of the dominant mindset, and in the second section Sometimes I Consider the Names of Places, Kei Miller draws attention to this – all the colours have been subsumed under ‘green’ in To Know Green from Green, all the islands are ‘Indio’ in Sometimes I Consider the Names of Places (3):

We are insufficiently imagined people from an insufficiently
imagined place

and the magnificent Place Name: Oracabesa, which points out that the whole country is being assessed solely in terms of the gold which colonialists expected to find there. What we know of a place or a people is limited by the limitations we create in our language.

In Scotland, where the history of erasure and exile in the Highlands was suppressed until recently, while at the same time, Scottish people enacted the very same oppression elsewhere in the name of the British Empire, it relevant that Miller also discusses how Jamaicans themselves align themselves with the dominant colonial culture, denying their history, forgetting their own local knowledge and stories, abandoning local dialects to speak with ‘sweet yankee accents’ or aspiring to own a BMW X5 (VII:II). It is important for Jamaicans to be aware of the stubborn survival of native folk tales and urban myths amid

de heap
of bruk bokkle & de plenty bun up cyar

and the mint, pawpaw sage and ginger, the poisonous or healing plants that grandmothers know.

they are here – in the complications of roots, in the dirtiness
of dirt.

And not only survival, but development. Here Where Run the Wild Deer deals with the importation and escape into the wild of six reindeer, which behave like the invasive species we deplore here, but in this poem serve as a parable of adaptation and inclusion ‘how to belong/where we do not belong’.

But he also points out that the shadow is a place of denial and scapegoating, where a people may indiscriminately locate things they don’t want to accept, like poverty, shame, homosexuality, crime, violence. It is a place of judgement, where to be found is to be made a criminal or a corpse and all sense of individual identity is lost. The book opens with a memorial list of ‘only some’ of those found dead there and the last section, In Nearby Bushes, is a meditation on the death of a young woman, who becomes again a real individual person – ‘in the dream you are my cousin’, whose death is mourned, and whose life is given the value and dignity the nearby bushes have denied her.

This is a dark book, with dark themes, but it is not heavy. There is a lightness, a conversational tone ‘I mean the flowers —- I no longer mean the flowers’ (Here Where Blossoms the Night) which belies the complexity of the subject and a great attention to the skills of story-tellers. The rhythms are crafted for careful reading aloud, with beautiful cadences which remind me of the King James translation (or in my case the Douai) of the Bible, though there are no explicit verbal echoes. Although 2020 has been a fabulous year for new poetry (Moya Campbell, Alice Oswald, Natalie Diaz and Seán Hewitt, so far, and it’s only August), I think this might be the outstanding book of the year, for me.

In Nearby Bushes

Kei Miller

Carcanet 978 1 78410 845 8

August 17, 2020
Midsummer Morning

We have got to Midsummer’s Day, and the weather is hot and sunny. The birds nesting in the garden have all flown, and people have begun to cut their hedges, and along by the river the yellowhammers are just leaving the nests, with their distinctive calls racketing through the hawthorns and alders they seem to like.

It is peak herb this week, with roses, lavender, woodruff (I’m a little too late for this really, but I’ll dry it anyway, to use as a fixative for potpourri), chickweed, self-heal and clover all ready for harvesting, and peppermint and yarrow bulking up. The traditional midsummer herbs, St. John’s wort and meadowsweet are not yet flowering here, but they are close. There are chopped chives in the freezer, and basil ready for making pesto.

These are the first of the marigolds, which I sowed back in the autumn, and forgot about. There will be plenty more from the spring sowing, and they will last well into the autumn.

The plants that dominate the garden this week, however, are the ferns. They have some association with this time of year, with fairies and with midsummer magic. It was believed that you could sprinkle fern seed in your shoe and become invisible – more on this website.

This one is the hart’s tongue fern.

and this is polypody. A lot of ferns have had traditional medicinal uses, but they are most welcome in my garden for their refreshing green in the glare of summer, and because they will cope with shade.

Posting here may be a little erratic over the next few weeks. Lockdown has been tough on all of us, and especially on some of my family, and we all need a bit of chilling time. But I will be writing and gardening, and I hope there will be a newsletter soon, inspred by clover. Enjoy the summer!

June 24, 2020
Living la Vida Lockdown-Here Comes the Sun

It’s the warmest day so far, and the garden is looking quite pretty. I’m not the only one taking photos today – my daughter has caught me in the act of actual gardening, harvesting thyme.

I have moved on to the planting out stage, the tomatoes are in the greenhouse border, and the aubergines are in bigger pots. There are planters full of ammi majus, lupins and cerinthe, and fennel and agastache are in the borders. There are helichrysum, mollucella and nicandra which I will dry for winter flower arrangements, and annual seeds in the gaps left by the bulbs which have gone over. My initial optimism about the germination of said seeds has since been damped by the realisation that a lot of the green shoots have turned out to be hairy bittercress and willow herb, but you never know. The recent rain has done wonders for everything!

Mostly I include rather pleasnat pictures of my activities, but you’ll be glad to know there are no photos of the comfrey liquid I’ve just strained and stored in old milk cartons. It smells particularly vile, but it is rich in potassium and the tomatoes and fruit bushes will be getting a very healty watering of this stuff over the next few months. More photogenically, I have started to harvest my herbs, first making a dandelion muscle rub for aches and tightness, and a violet leaf oil for skin sensitivity, and now drying thyme on a rack I made years ago from a muslin nappy tacked to a frame of leftover 2×2 struts.

I’m also making chive flower vinegar, which is coloured implausibly pink, and has a faint onion taste in salad dressings

Poetry is harder to come by. You might like to see, among many other good things, a poem I have in the latest edition of Stravaig, but there is very little new work of my own happening just now. However, I have started work on a new Red Squirrel Press pamphlet to be published in October, so I haven’t lost all my poetry muscles!

In Scotland we hope to hear more about the roadmap for coming out of lockdown tomorrow. It has been an anxious time, but one that has brought out both the best in our communities, and the strange and dangerous gaps in our politics economy and social and environmental thinking. I’m sure many people have been thinking how we can implement the lessons we have learned!

May 20, 2020

Latest Posts

Blog Categories

Archives by Date

Newsletter

Tag Cloud