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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

poetry

  • 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.

  • tidying up

    I’ve spent all week cleaning and tidying stuff. There seems no end to the waste paper a family can generate. Not to mention other stuff – out of date packets of semolina and glace cherries, guarantees and packaging for things you don’t even possess any more, six types of mismatched glass tumblers, redundant cables and keyboards, souvenirs whose provenance you don’t even remember.
    I have also spring-cleaned (odd how often spring-cleaning happens in autumn) my office, my accounts, my filing system and my work projects. I’d been getting bogged down in research (so many interesting things seem important and relevant – I think I was a jackdaw in a previous life)and not really thinking what exactly I wanted to do. But once you know that, the how and the when fall into place so neatly.
    I’m working on a collection of poems and short stories for the Lúcháir project while I put my notes together for Recusant and experiment with dialogue and layers of narrative and a more evolved and involved form than the one I’ve been used to.

  • 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.

  • still revising

    Almost completed the tinkering with Saracen Woman and she will be trying her luck again next week.
    Now I am re-thinking the Lúcháir blog, as life seems to have overtaken me, and beginning to think very hard about some elemental poems. Also about a holiday in Ireland which may actually happen. Also about Poetry in the Garden which is very much happening. I will need to read some new stuff, I think. We have had Eurydice for two years now.
    The ‘x’ key on my keyboard is sticking and it’s amazing how often you get to use it, and how odd your text looks without it. Is there anything you can do about sticky keys, or is it just time to cut my losses? I have the tiniest keyboard in the world, as I have very small hands, and though there are several normal keyboards in the house, I will certainly miss this one.

  • playing with Lucy

    Not much work is getting done today as I am spending it with my grand-daughter. Saracen Woman is recovering from the shock it got from agents. Note the change in title. Who was I kidding – it was always Mab’s story.
    The next novel is growing at the back of my mind. I’m thinking of calling it Recusant. It’s going to be a bit Jungian, and about music.
    But I’m also thinking about poetry for Lúcháir. There are several poems about water happening.

  • meeting heroes

    I went to a book launch last night. Anne Connolly’s book ‘Downside Up’ is indeed very fab, lots of poems about Ireland and her family, but not cosy or nostalgic, just thoughtful and beautiful.
    However, I also met Christine de Luca. And behaved with some enthusiasm.

    Christine de Luca is one of my favourite poets at the moment. She is from Shetland, and writes in Shetlandic as well as English, and this gives her poems a texture and multi-layered resonances with Old Norse and with Scandinavian poetry. She says it’s hard to do, though as Shetlandic poetry has to appeal to Shetlanders (otherwise what’s the point?) and then you find yourself writing to a niche market and restricting your options. She doesn’t give into this, though. The poems in Parallel Worlds are not backward looking, not rural idylls or ballads. They bring new words, new perspectives to poems that could have been written wherever poetry is a serious art form. She writes in English too, and then you see how a different language shapes your thought differently.

    I think there’s no point in being a poet if you can’t take Orpheus’ stand and say
    ‘All the words will be available to me’. I admit I was thinking about the big fancy grandiloquent words that I was sometimes made to feel weren’t for the likes of me, Liverpool Judy that I was. Especially when the trend for vernacular poetry came in. But it cuts both ways. All the words means ALL. Dialect, academic, technical, street words, rude words, foreign, antique, abstract, ugly words and neologisms.
    I admit it takes some skill make them pull together coherently. But some people can, and I aspire to it.

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