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…
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You can just see the snowdrops coming out in the garden, and there is a blink of yellow in the witch hazel buds, though I think it will take another week of warm weather for them to develop. And according to the forecast, we’re not getting that any time soon. So I have been thinking…
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Over the years I’ve blogged a few times about war. I’ve even written a couple of war poems. You can find one here, a true story from my childhood about a neighbour who served in the first world war. Another poem, Hugh’s Farewell to Arms is about a friend who served in the second world…
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Reading this book was like coming home. The subject range is very familiar – landscape, language, home, emigration, music. There are a good number of poems I wish I’d written – Carrying the Songs, First Poetry, To Colmcille Returning, and even one, Pollen, that I swear, I was just about to write. But it wouldn’t…
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One of the many upheavals in the cultural world over my lifetime has been a reappraisal of pastoral poetry. In my youth pastoral poetry was regarded as an artificial and rather sentimental construct – all these highly cultivated (and presumably rich) people pretending to live the simple life and envying the happy peasant his careless…
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These are pictures from last year, and choosing them really showed me how late everything is. This time last year the alchemilla looked like this: and it does, just about!But in my May folder there are pictures of my iris border in full flower, and it’s only just in bud now, and all these aquilegias…
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As I look out of my window, May doesn’t seem so very merry. There is a mass of thick grey cloud away to the north, and a cold wind blowing intermittent rain showers at the window. Moreover, I’ve been out of action with a bad headache, and not feeling disposed to be merry at all—…
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Well, April was a busy month! As well as Easter and the Dark Mountain Writing Weekend, there was the Easter holidays and the spring garden work to contend with. All this, and NaPoWriMo too! Unsurprisingly, I didn’t make a poem a day, but I did manage 24 poems. Most are still in first draft form,…
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Last weekend I was at the Dark Mountain Wriiting Weekend at Wiston Lodge, organised by Susan Richardson and Em Strang. Sue was someone I’d got to know via the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, and you can read some of her poetry in the new issue of Stravaig, and I’d come across Em’s work in Earthlines…
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Most of the garden seems to have been in suspended animation lately.I’ve been looking at the rhubarb for a month, saying “Another week will do it!” with no result. On the other hand, the primroses are thickening up nicely, and the whole spring border seems to have made a step forward.But everything was getting very…
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