Events

Natural Callander

As part of Callander Summerfest, there will be an evening of nature themed poetry

Thursday 26th July at 19:00 at Callander Hostel (formerly Bridge Hotel)

6 Bridgend FK17 8AH Callander

Well-known local poets Elizabeth Rimmer (Cambuskenneth), Charlie Gracie (Thornton) and Helen McLaren (Dollar) will perform their natural history poems alongside Callander poet and publisher Sally Evans and will maybe include contributions from the Writers’ Workshop in the afternoon. If fair, we may be able to enjoy the garden and views of Ben Ledi and the Meadows!

Free of charge, all welcome! No need to book, just turn up.

July 23, 2018
The Bath Hotel, 66 Victoria St, Sheffield. S3 7QL

Tuesday June 12^th 2018

7.30p.m.

Elizabeth Rimmer and David Troupes
plus Open Mic

Hosted by Jenny Hockey

A chance to immerse yourself in two different landscapes – with Scottish poet Elizabeth Rimmer who writes from the wild edges of settled lands and communities – and David Troupes who explores the dialogue between the human body and New England’s large, unfettered places.

Elizabeth Rimmer has published three collections of poetry with Red Squirrel Press, Wherever We Live Now, (2011), The Territory of Rain, (2015), and Haggards in 2018. She has always taken an interest in herbs and how we use them as symbols for the values we cherish, and produced a modern translation of the Old English Charm of Nine Herbs in 2017. She has edited two poetry collections for Red Squirrel Press, and the most recent anthology of the Federation of Writers (Scotland) Landfall.
Her website is www.burnedthumb.com

David Troupes has published two collections of poetry, Parsimony (2009) and The Simple Men (2012), and a selection of more recent work appeared in Carcanet’s 2015 anthology New Poetries VI. He is currently a Fellow of the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme, collaborating with composer Joel Rust on a new science-fiction opera. Last year he completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield, on the topic of Ted Hughes and Christianity. He also produces a comic strip, Buttercup Festival, which has been featured in PN Review and Poetry Wales, and can be read online at www.buttercupfestival.com.

As usual there will be our superb Open Mic
See you there! Jenny

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June 6, 2018

St Mungo’s Mirrorball Showcase

St Mungo’s Mirrorball Showcase 2

5 Poets in one glorious evening! CCA Clubroom Sauchiehall Street Glasgow, at 7pm

Oli Hazzard’s’s first collection of poems, Between Two Windows (Carcanet, 2012), won the English Association’s Michael Murphy Memorial Prize and an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and was a book of the year in the Guardian, the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. His second collection, Blotter (Carcanet), and a study of John Ashbery’s poetry, The Minor Eras: John Ashbery and Post-War English Poetry (Oxford University Press), will be published in 2018.

Sophie Collins grew up in Bergen, North Holland, and now lives in Edinburgh. She is co-editor of tender, an online arts quarterly, and editor of Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016), an anthology of contemporary poetry translations. small white monkeys, a text on self-expression, self-help and shame, was published by Book Works in 2017 as part of a commissioned residency at Glasgow Women’s Library. Her first poetry collection, Who Is Mary Sue?, was published by Faber & Faber in February 2018. She is currently Assistant Professor of Poetry at Durham University.

Poems by Patrick James Errington have won numerous prizes, including the Wigtown Poetry Prize, The London Magazine Poetry Competition, The Flambard Prize, and the National Poetry Competition, and appear regularly in journals and anthologies like Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Oxford Poetry, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, and Copper Nickel. In 2017, his French translation of PJ Harvey’s poetry collection, The Hollow of the Hand, was released by Éditions l’Âge d’Homme, and just this year his own chapbook, Glean, was released by ignitionpress. Born and raised in Alberta, Canada, Patrick is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA programme and is now a doctoral candidate at the University of St Andrews. https://pjerrington.com/

Elizabeth Rimmer has published three collections of poetry with Red Squirrel Press, Wherever We Live Now, (2011), The Territory of Rain, (2015), and Haggards in 2018.She has always taken an interest in herbs and how we use them as symbols for the values we cherish, and produced a modern translation of the Old English Charm of Nine Herbs in 2017. She has edited two poetry collections for Red Squirrel Press, and the most recent anthology of the Federation of Writers (Scotland) Landfall. She is a council member of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics. Her website is www.burnedthumb.com.

Jane Hartshorn has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Kent. In 2017, her first pamphlet tract was published by Litmus Publishing. She has had poems published in MAP Magazine, Raum, Gnommero, Glasgow University’s From Glasgow to Saturn, and Poetry Scotland’s The Open Mouse.

April 9, 2018

Summer Haggards Readings
In addition to the Glasgow readings mentioned in my recent events posts, I have advance news of some later readings:
- Glasgow Launch of Haggards. The Scottish Writers Centre will host this on the 8th May, at the CCA Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow alongside books from Brian Johnstone, Judith Taylor and Tim Turnbull. 7-9pm.
- St Mungo’s Mirrorball. I will be reading at this event which takes place at the CCA, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow on 31st May 7-9pm.
- Writers in the Bath Sheffield. I will be reading at The Bath Hotel, 66 Victoria St, S3 7QL (off West Street) on Tuesday 12th June, along with David Troupes.
- Callander Writers Group Thursday 26th July (time and venue to be confirmed), along with Sally Evans, Charlie Gracie and Helen McLaren.
March 29, 2018
Haggards Readings
- Edinburgh Launch of Haggards. Haggards will be launched on February 10th, at the Scottish Poetry Library at 13:00. Tickets from Eventbrite here.
- StAnza 2018 (7th-11th March). I will be taking part in a Red Squirrel Press showcase on Friday 9th March, alongside Judith Taylor and Colin Will in the Council Chamber Townhall, from 13:00 -14:00. For more information, please see here.
- Glasgow Launch of Haggards. The Scottish Writers Centre will host this on the 8th May, at the CCA Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow alongside books from Brian Johnstone, Judith Taylor and Colin Will. 7-9pm.
- St Mungo’s Mirrorball. I will be reading at this event which takes place at the CCA, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow on 31st May 7-9pm
February 1, 2018
Some Thanks and Endorsements for Haggards

A book doesn’t come into being without the help of a great many people, and this was more than usually the case this time. I’ve had help with my research into herbs from all kinds of people, including the musician Kate Young (see here for my post about her herb-based compositions Umbelliferae,) the story-teller Patsy Dyer, who designed the herb garden at Kilmartin, Oregon herbalist Heather Níc An Fhleisdeir, environmental activist Ginny Batson, and members of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics.

There were people who supported and encouraged me to write – friends from the Burgh Poets and Forth Valley Writers, and in particular, Laura Fyfe who beta-read The Wren in the Ash Tree for me, and Em Strang who encouraged me to send a bit of it to Dark Mountain 9.

But special thanks must go to the two poets who gave me endorsements for the cover. Roselle Angwin, poet and teacher of creative and reflective writing wrote this:

‘The things which you learn with your hands, / your tongue, your ears, the glimpses / at the edge of vision, are not the things /we want you to write down,’ says Elizabeth Rimmer, who makes her fine writing specifically through these things.

Her poetry is deceptive: its delicate observations of the world around her conceal a sharpness of perception that resides in her poet’s eye and imagination, and in her accurate intuitions of what will most add implicit depth to a poem. I’m struck by the collusion of subtlety and surprise in so many of the poems, and also by Rimmer’s fine use of metaphor and diction.
She has an unerring sense of when best to introduce a line break, and of the power of a simple but unusual word-choice.

I wouldn’t want to choose my favourites, but I have to say that some of the poems about plants (the ‘haggards’) and trees seem particularly alive to me.

This is a collection I feel privileged to have had a pre-publication view of; already it’s taken up residence at the edge of my own vision.
Roselle Angwin

and Susan Richardson, poetry editor of Zoomorphic wrote:

The breadth of both the physical and emotional landscape of Haggards is breathtaking. Whether crafting an intimate, pithy poem about a pebble or tackling an ambitious sequence on social and ecological collapse, Elizabeth Rimmer writes in language that’s all at once sensuous, precise and elegant. Themes of resistance, resilience and regeneration in the human and more-than-human worlds are explored throughout the collection, gaining urgency and momentum in ‘The Wren in the Ash Tree’, the stirring final section. There’s no shying away from the anguish of grief and loss, yet Haggards remains an uplifting read, one that celebrates the capacity of woman, bird, seed and herb to survive and thrive ‘in the wild and unregarded places in between’.

– Susan Richardson

Sometimes it feels like a privilege to have your work read at all, but to read a response from someone who really gets what you were trying for, is a gift beyond price.

Thank you, everyone – when you see the book in a bit less than a fortnight, I hope you will enjoy seeing what you helped me do.

January 31, 2018
Fanfare!

And here it is. I can’t tell you how delighted I am with this cover. I’m particularly thrilled that I can identify almost all of the plants, and that many of them are growing in the actual haggard near me that inspired some of the poems. The typesetting and layout inside are a joy too. Designer Gerry Cambridge has done a wonderful job – just wait until you see the introduction page to The Wren in the Ash Tree. I can’t thank Gerry enough for this beautiful job.

There are other people who should be thanked for getting Haggards this far. Some of them have been mentioned in the acknowledgements page (but you never remember them all). Some of them will be getting a mention next week. Today I want to thank not only Gerry Cambridge but also my wonderful publisher Sheila Wakefield, founder of Red Squirrel Press, who has done her usual miracle in getting the book out, despite the battles with more than average turbulence in the professional and personal lives of both of us. I don’t know where I would be without her!

In other news, you can now buy my previous books on amazon :

Wherever We Live Now

and

The Territory of Rain

And if you felt like reviewing it, that would be lovely!

January 24, 2018
Snow Day

When your day looks like this! I keep planning to start the gardening, clearing leaves where the primroses are coming through starting the first seeds and mulching ground for new plantings, but not yet, not yet —

Though the sun is shining and a lot of the snow is melting now, it wasn’t happening this morning when I went out at seven o’clock. The best bit of being the first out, though, is that you can see where the fox came up the street. It isn’t all gloom however –

this witch hazel is good to go, and in the sheltered corners, the first snowdrops are peeping through the green, there are fat buds on the camellia, and look –

fully open hazel catkins, blazing in the sunshine.

I have been very busy editing proofs, and Haggards has gone to the printer. I’ve been giving the website a good pruning and reorganisation – it has been getting quite unwieldy, with all the different activities I’ve been involved in. It will have a new look soon, thanks to my lovely webmaster, but in the short term, I’ve been adding new events to the news page. I do hope that I will see many of you at one or another of them. The first is in Falkirk, as part of the One Weekend in Falkirk Event, on Friday 26th January at the Gin Lounge, (above the Wine Library) Princes Street, Falkirk.

The year’s editing is about to start, too. The submissions for Stravaig 6 have come in, and we will soon be selecting some of the outstanding work that was inspired by Expressing the Earth conference convened by The Scottish Centre for Geopoetics in June. It’s looking very promising!

January 17, 2018
2017 Best of Times, Worst of Times

This was taken on a very frosty walk at Cambus yesterday, where the river Devon flows into the Forth. The light was wonderful, and we’ll be going back there again, as soon as we thaw out!

This pretty much sums up my year – wonderful if you look at it one way, awful in another light. It’s easy to see why it was so bad. Both Trump and Brexit have turned out even worse than we could have told them they would be, and some of the recurring health problems that plague our family came back with their big boots on. Then there were upheavals in many of the poetry circles I frequent, and many of my friends and family have dealt with severe illnesses and bereavement. It’s mostly my job to look after people, but this year hit hard, reaching a real low when I found myself in a street in Glasgow suddenly, and mercifully temporarily, unable to work out who I was or where I lived.

This lasted for a very short time – no longer than it takes to orientate yourself from a dream you wake up from wondering whether it was real or not – but it was enough to make me take stock of what on earth I think I am doing with my life. And from there on it was all good. Everyone who had health problems has received very good care, and I go into next year with very much less responsibility and concern. I cut back my involvement in projects that weren’t working for me, and and called a few spades by their proper names instead of pretending that things were fine and I would go on pretending I was okay with things.

And I looked at the wonderful things that have happened – a fortieth wedding anniversary trip to London, blogging at StAnza, finishing Haggards, the Expressing the Earth conference, which is still bearing fruit in many exciting ways, the Charm of Nine Herbs translation which was so much fun to do, the wonderful reading and workshop at Taigh Chearsabhagh I wrote about last time, editing Landfall for The Federation of Writers, and Matt MacDonald’s Petrichor which will be out next year.

And the books – Rachael Boast’s Void Studies, Sophie McKeand’s Rebel Sun, Jim Carruth’s Black Cart, Rachel McCrum’s First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate, JL Williams After Economy and Judith Taylor’s Not in Nightingale Country in poetry, and Claire Wellesley-Smith’s Slow Stitch, which inspired a new type of creativity. Those have been absolutely brilliant.

So it’s been impossible to find a balanced response to this year – average it was not. And the outlook is similarly unstable. And yet I find myself believing very firmly in human resilience and common sense. The world is full of people who resist hysteria and self-destruction, who refuse to be party to the nonsense we see around us, who respond to a crisis with gentleness, compassion and creativity. I’ll finish with the last bit of The Wren in the Ash Tree which sums it up:

A wren is singing
in the damp hush after the rain.
Between desire and action is insight,
a quiet emptiness where something like
the startling wake of poetry in my head
can happen, making new.

Among the wrecked buildings
Abandoned in the heart of Govan
there are patches of tilled earth
lavender and mint, two carrot plants,
a stand of potatoes. On the door
of an abandoned church, a poster –
classes for drummers, taekwondo,
English as a second language,
poetry for those who have the time
on a wet Friday morning, in all
the languages of earth.

In the silence, a wren is singing.

This is probably the last post of this year, so Ill take the chance to wish everyone a happy Christmas and New Year.

December 19, 2017
Taigh Chearsabhagh

This is where I was last week. It was amazing.

There was a long cold drive to Uig through frost and snow and sometimes blinding sunshine – there was a magnificent rainbow on Skye – and then a quiet crossing to Lochmaddy. The Hamersay House where we were to stay was very pleasant and welcoming, and in fact so was everyone we met.

I like how island communities fit a lot into what looks like a sparse landscape. There are shops that combine post office craft stall and cafe in a building about as big as an average kitchen. Taigh Chearsabagh has three art studios (lovely light rooms overlooking the harbour) where you can do a full art degree and distance learning facilities for degrees in Gaelic and Music as well as more technical studies. It’s very child-friendly too – someone told me that her grandchildren found ‘their peers are everybody’. It was good to hear Gaelic being spoken too.

But the landscape, though sparse, is beautiful.

I wrote this poem after our first visit (in 2006, I think):

Rushlight

Perhaps at the damp end of a dour day,
when whey-thin clouds clot and curdle
against a washed out sky, and the puny wind
sharpens the rain in my face like teeth,
I might find the rim of a blue lochan
sleeping in the cold lap of the hills, where
water-lilies fold white stars in green cups,
and reeds wade knee-deep, and whisper.

Then if the clouds would open like eyes
and, in the sudden fall of sunlight, a curlew
cry, emptying the air, and the rippled
water blink between the reed-stems –
then I would look, and listen, and grow still.
Then I would know what I came for.

This time there weren’t any waterlilies, but the curlews were still there – and there were whooper swans. I wasn’t disappointed!

I read Rushlight as the first poem on the Thursday with poems from all three books, and then on Friday we had a workshop. I used lemon balm as a reference (there was a plant and some cookies!) and writing from herbals through the ages about it, showing how differently herbalists have felt about their subjects, and then some writing about landscapes evoked through the plants growing there. Some wonderful writing came out of it – a recollection of traditional healing, including a Gaelic charm, memories of gardens and of learning about plants, a powerful and thought-provoking reminiscence of wild coriander growing in the streets of Bradford, some lovely sensual evocations of the scents of herbs, and some well-expressed thinking about what knowledge might be important to us. It always surprises me how well Schoolish goes down (this poem is coming out in the next issue of WriteAngle, so I can’t share it here, but I’ve read it a bit, so you might know it), but it certainly hit a nerve!

And while I was doing that , my husband was out looking at this:

That is St Kilda, out in the distance.

I must say a big heart-felt thank you to Uist Art Association for inviting me, to Pauline Prior-Pitt who does so much work organising things so excellently, and to everyone who came and listened and wrote and bought books. You were fantastic!

December 5, 2017