Eggplant.place

173d

It’s for weddings
and funerals
and reading on the train
and for taking a person out of herself
and bringing her back more sane…

—Helena Nelson, “Poetry Forum”
published in DOWN WITH POETRY! (Happenstance, 2016)

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/poetry-forum/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #WorldPoetryDay

Poetry Forum
by Helena Nelson

What is poetry for? (Maitreyabhandu)

It’s for weddings
and funerals
and reading on the train
and for taking a person out of herself
and bringing her back more sane.

It’s for children
and lunatics
and chimney-sweeps and punks
It’s for teachers
and preachers
and politicians and drunks.

It’s for dinner
and afternoon tea
and marvellous midnight snacks.
It’s for cravings
and ravings
and low-poetry attacks.

It’s for four o’clock
for four of us
and for five o’clock
for five.
It’s for fortitude
and forums
for formalists to survive.

It’s for all we know intelligent
and rarely less than clever.
You can get some
for nothing
and remember it
forever.

ALT

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173d

Tha i mar bharaille de sgadan saillte:
chan eil agad ach do chròg
a stobadh ann, agus dòrlach a thoirt a-mach,
reamhar is tiugh leis a’ bhuntàta…

—Aonghas Phàdraig Caimbeul, “Bàrdachd”
published in AIBISIDH, Polygon Books 2011

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/bardachd/

#Scottish #literature #Gaidhlig #Gaelic #poem #poetry #WorldPoetryDay

Bàrdachd
Aonghas Phàdraig Caimbeul

Tha i mar bharaille de sgadan saillte:
chan eil agad ach do chròg
a stobadh ann, agus dòrlach a thoirt a-mach,
reamhar is tiugh leis a’ bhuntàta.

Stob
an t-ìm na mheasg
agus tha cuirm agad: Eliot is Donnachadh Bàn,
le do làmhan rùisgte. Seachain
forca is sgian: fàg sin aig na sgoilearan.

Nuair a thig thu gu bonn a’ bharaille
sgròb na craicinn ri chèile,
dean ràth chnàimhean,
lìon lannan
’s tilg sin thairis
dìreach mu àm reothairt.

Ma ghlacas tu adag,
thoir leat i: nuair tha an sgadan
gann, nì easgann fraighte fhèin a’ chùis
san acras.

ALT

Poetry
Angus Peter Campbell

It’s like a barrel of salt herring:
you only have to stick your paw
in, and lift a handful out,
thick and juicy with the tatties.

Pile
the butter in the middle
and you have a feast: Eliot and Duncan Bàn,
eaten with your bare fingers. Don’t use
a knife and fork: leave that to the scholars.

When you reach the bottom of the barrel
scrape the skins together,
make a raft of bones,
a net of fine filament,
and fling it over the side
just after the spring tide.

If you catch a common haddock,
take it anyway: in the absence
of a fat herring even eels
taste fine when deep-fried.

ALT

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173d

a cop in a panda
wound down his window & asked us
what we had in our bags
to which we shouted POETRY!
in unison,
lifted
thick majestic photocopies
and POEMS OF THIRTY YEARS
by Edwin Morgan into the air
as he looked on in horror
and told us to be on our way
and not to do it again…

—Graham Fulton, “Poetry Reaper”

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/poetry-reaper/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #WorldPoetryDay

The Poetry Reaper
Graham Fulton

sitting in The Scotia
after John McGarrigle who-
was-killed-in-The Clutha’s funeral,
wolfing
triangular tuna sandwiches
and listening to someone singing
We Shall Overcome
into a feedback microphone, I ask
Bobby Christie
if he remembers walking home
twenty-five years ago
from Tom Leonard’s Writers’ Group
in Paisley in the dark
with
towering orange streetlamps
and turning left into Penilee Road
where a cop in a panda
wound down his window and asked us
what we had in our bags
to which we shouted POETRY!
in unison,
lifted
thick majestic photocopies
and POEMS OF THIRTY YEARS
by Edwin Morgan into the air
as he looked on in horror
and told us to be on our way
and not to do it again

ALT

and Bobby
disappeared over the hill
as I turned right into Atholl Crescent
to go to a house where I no longer live
to talk to people who
are no longer there,
and Jim Ferguson
is wearing a burning red tie
and brandishing a virtual cigarette, and
We Shall Overcome was sung
by Joan Baez in 1963, it’s really
hard to believe, it feels
as if yesterday
has still to happen, tomorrow
is already gone

ALT

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173d

Poets need not be garlanded;
the poet’s head
should be innocent of the leaves of the sweet bay tree,
twisted. All honour goes to poetry…

—Liz Lochhead, “Poets Need Not”
published in A HANDSEL: New & Collected Poems (Birlinn, 2023)

https://birlinn.co.uk/product/a-handsel/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #WorldPoetryDay

Poets need not
Liz Lochhead

Poets need not be garlanded;
the poet’s head
should be innocent of the leaves of the sweet bay tree,
twisted. All honour goes to poetry.

And poets need no laurels. Why be lauded
for the love of trying to nail the disembodied
image with that one plain word to make it palpable;
for listening in to silence for the rhythm capable
of carrying the thought that’s not thought yet?
The pursuit’s its own reward. So you have to let
the poem come to voice by footering
late in the dark at home, by muttering
syllables of scribbled lines – or what might
be lines, eventually, if you can get it right.

And this, perhaps, in public? The daytime train,
the biro, the back of an envelope, and again
the fun of the wildgoose chase
that goes beyond all this fuss.

Inspiration? Bell rings, penny drops,
the light-bulb goes on and tops
the not-good-enough idea that went before?
No, that’s not how it goes. You write, you score
it out, you write it in again the same
but somehow with a different stress. This is a game
you very seldom win
and most of your efforts end up in the bin.

ALT

There’s one hunched and gloomy
heron haunts that nearby stretch of River Kelvin
and it wouldn’t if there were no fish.
If it never in all that greyness passing caught a flash,
a gleam of something, made that quick stab.
That’s how a poem is after a long nothingness, you grab
at that anything and this is food to you.
It comes through, as leaves do.

All praise to poetry, the way it has
of attaching itself to a familiar phrase
in a new way, insisting it be heard and seen.
Poets need no laurels, surely?
their poems, when they can make them happen – even rarely –
crown them with green.

ALT

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183d

A filth of leaves, she said, a froth, she said
Of sudsy flowers, and there’s your mawkish Spring.
Oh, barebone tree, what has it done to you?
Black field, you’re gone but for remembering…

—Norman MacCaig, “Green stain”
published in THE POEMS OF NORMAN MacCAIG (Birlinn, 2009)

https://birlinn.co.uk/product/the-poems-of-norman-maccaig/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #NormanMacCaig #20thcentury #Spring

Green stain
Norman MacCaig

A filth of leaves, she said, a froth, she said
Of sudsy flowers, and there’s your mawkish Spring.
Oh, barebone tree, what has it done to you?
Black field, you’re gone but for remembering.

I keep my winter where my heart should be.
– I’d rather bear it in its blackest moods
Than see those frilly leaves and blossoms make
A haberdashery of wholesome woods.

A mish-mash green, a sickly groping, such
A fumbling into light! How could they surpass
The icy shapes of darling winter hidden
In luckless trees and ill-starred meadow grass?

ALT

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182d

In limbo, on a still March day, the streets
are gritty and the sun papered over
and the great-tits in bare trees are keening
Weegie Weegie Weegie…

—Carol McKay, “Keening”
published in Poetry Scotland 102 (Autumn 2021)

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/keening/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Spring #March

Keening
Carol McKay

In limbo, on a still March day, the streets
are gritty and the sun papered over
and the great-tits in bare trees are keening
Weegie Weegie Weegie.

A man is blocking a hole in the soffit
under the dentist’s roof where the jackdaws
last year raised their chicks.
But he might not know.

My thoughts are moths. They rise up, powdery grey,
and fly off, leaving dusty residue.
In this isolation, far from my chicks,
I don’t know where I am, or how, or who.

Above my head a great gull ululates.
I lean into this old stone wall with its
sugaring of mica and its silvery trails
and my chest and throat spasm soundless in our unifying loss.

Then jackdaws, black against wallpaper cloud,
stratify into six pairs, giddy with love,
in tune with spring’s ever-renewing surge,
and I centre. Ground.

ALT

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172d

You’d know her house by the drawn blinds –
by the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall,
the black crosses of their wings hung out to dry…

—Robin Robertson, “At Roane Head”
in the London Review of Books, 14 August 2008

Today, 22 March, is International Seal Day 🦭

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n16/robin-robertson/at-roane-head

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #folklore #seal #seals #selkie #InternationalSealDay

At Roane Head
Robin Robertson

for John Burnside

You’d know her house by the drawn blinds –
by the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall,
the black crosses of their wings hung out to dry.
You’d tell it by the quicken and the pine that hid it
from the sea and from the brief light of the sun,
and by Aonghas the collie, lying at the door
where he died: a rack of bones like a sprung trap.

A fork of barnacle geese came over, with that slow
squeak of rusty saws. The bitter sea’s complaining pull
and roll; a whicker of pigeons, lifting in the wood.

She’d had four sons, I knew that well enough,
and each one wrong. All born blind, they say,
slack-jawed and simple, web-footed,
rickety as sticks. Beautiful faces, I’m told,
though blank as air.
Someone saw them once, outside, hirpling
down to the shore, chittering like rats,
and said they were fine swimmers,
but I would have guessed at that.

Her husband left her: said
they couldn’t be his, they were more
fish than human;
he said they were beglamoured,
and searched their skin for the showing marks.

ALT

For years she tended each difficult flame:
their tight, flickering bodies.
Each night she closed
the scales of their eyes to smoor the fire.

Until he came again,
that last time,
thick with drink, saying
he’d had enough of this,
all this witchery,
and made them stand
in a row by their beds,
twitching. Their hands
flapped; herring-eyes
rolled in their heads.
He went along the line
relaxing them
one after another
with a small knife.

They say she goes out every night to lay
blankets on the graves to keep them warm.
It would put the heart across you, all that grief.

There was an otter worrying in the leaves, a heron
loping slow over the water when I came
at scraich of day, back to her door.

She’d hung four stones in a necklace, wore
four rings on the hand that led me past the room
with four small candles burning
which she called ‘the room of rain’.
Milky smoke poured up from the grate
like a waterfall in reverse
and she said my name,
and it was the only thing
and the last thing that she said.

She gave me a skylark’s egg in a bed of frost;
gave me twists of my four sons’ hair; gave me
her husband’s head in a wooden box.
Then she gave me the sealskin, and I put it on.

ALT

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172d

My son has birds in his head.

I know them now. I catch
the pitch of their calls, their shrill
cacophonies, their chitterings, their coos…

—“Daedalus”, by Alastair Reid (1926–2014) – born 100 years ago #OTD, 22 March
published in WEATHERING, @canongatebooks 1978

1/4

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury

Daedalus
Alastair Reid

My son has birds in his head.

I know them now. I catch
the pitch of their calls, their shrill
cacophonies, their chitterings, their coos.
They hover behind his eyes and come to rest
on a branch, on a book, grow still,
claws curled, wings furled.
His is a bird world.

I learn the flutter of his moods,
his moments of swoop and soar.
From the ground I feel him try
the limits of the air –
sudden lift, sudden terror –
and move in time to cradle
his quivering, feathered fear.

At evening, in the tower,
I see him to sleep and see
the hooding-over of eyes,
the slow folding of wings.
I wake to his morning twitterings,
to the croomb of his becoming.

He chooses his selves – wren, hawk,
swallow or owl – to explore
the trees and rooftops of his heady wishing.
Tomtit, birdwit.
Am I to call him down, to give him
a grounding, teach him gravity?
Gently, gently.
Time tells us what we weigh, and soon enough
his feet will reach the ground.
Age, like a cage, will enclose him.
So the wise men said.

My son has birds in his head.

ALT

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172d

“I am a man upon the land,
I am a selkie in the sea,
And when I’m far and far frae land
My hame is in the Sule Skerry”

—The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry (traditional)

22 March is #InternationalSealDay 🦭

🎨: Vernon Hill, “The Great Sealchie of Sule Skerrie”, in Ballads Weird & Wonderful (1912)

#Scottish #literature #folksong #folklore #selkie #poem #poetry #Scots #Scotslanguage #seal #seals

The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry
Traditional

An earthly nourris sits and sings
And aye she sings, “Ba lilly wean,
Little ken I my bairnie’s faither
Far less the land that he bides in.”

And up come he to her bed fit,
And a grumlie guest I’m sure was he,
Saying, “Here am I, thy bairnie’s faither
Although I may not comely be.

“I am a man upon the land,
I am a selkie in the sea,
And when I’m far and far frae land
My hame is in the Sule Skerry.”

Then he has taen a purse of gold
And he has set it on her knee,
Saying, “Gie to me, my ain wee son,
And you accept your nourris fee.

“It shall come to pass on a summer’s day
When the sun shines bricht on every stane
That I will tak my ain wee son
And learn him how to swim the faem.

“And you will marry a proud gunner,
And a richt good gunner I’m sure he’ll be,
And wi the first shot that e’er he fires
He’ll kill baith my bonnie son and me.”

ALT

A monochrome illustration, full of soft, subtle shading. A young woman cradles a baby at her breast. She looks over her shoulder towards a strange, splay-legged figure, bearded, with a drooping moustache and small, staring, inhuman eyes. He reaches out his right hand, offering the woman a small sack of coins. A small crucifix hangs on a post behind the two figures.

ALT

Edited 172d ago

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181d

When you were people
We could have loved you,
Found out your names
And brought you presents…

—AC Jacobs, “Poem for Innocent Victims of War”
Published in NAMELESS COUNTRY: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2018)

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781784106751/nameless-country/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury #WarPoetry

Poem for Innocent Victims of War
A. C. Jacobs

You did not die for me
Or love or desperation.
No-one chipped your names
On plaques on peaceful blocks of stone.
You are just the useless dead
Who mock our daily sin of passion,
Climb through our heads in cold, slow silence.

When you were people
We could have loved you,
Found out your names
And brought you presents.
We could have walked around with your response.

Or even if you chose to die
We might have understood your longing
And written down your utmost fear.

Now, though, you have got beyond our feelings,
And we can never almost follow
To learn your last shared and perfect secret.

ALT

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180d

“The more time you spend here in the Highlands, the more you recognise and realise and come to feel yourself part of the different layers of the land [… people] see it as wild and untameable, when in actual fact it is very much a human landscape”

—Annie Worsley recommends her best five books on the Scottish Highlands

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/scottish-highlands-annie-worsley/

#Scottish #literature #poetry #naturewriting #memoir #NanShepherd #NormanMacCaig #Highlands #ScottishHighlands #books

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180d

When proof of Einstein’s Glaswegian birth
First hit the media everything else was dropped…

—Robert Crawford, “Alba Einstein” – from Selected Poems (Cape, 2005)

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was born #OTD, 14 March. In Glasgow.

Listen to Robert Crawford read “Alba Einstein” on The Poetry Archive:

https://poetryarchive.org/poem/alba-einstein/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Einstein #FamousScots #Glasgow

Alba Einsten
Robert Crawford

When proof of Einstein’s Glaswegian birth
First hit the media everything else was dropped:
Logie Baird, Dundee painters, David Hume – all
Got the big E. Physics documentaries
Became peak-viewing; Scots publishers hurled awa
MacDiarmid like an overbaked potato, and swooped
On the memorabilia: Einstein Used My Fruitshop,
Einstein in Old Postcards, Einstein's Bearsden Relatives.
Hot on their heels came the A. E. Fun Park,
Quantum Court, Glen Einstein Highland Malt.
Glasgow was booming. Scotland rose to its feet
At Albert Suppers where The Toast to the General Theory
Was given by footballers, panto-dames, or restaurateurs.
In the US an ageing lab-technician recorded
How the Great Man when excited showed a telltale glottal stop.
He'd loved fiddlers’ rallies. His favourite sport was curling.
Thanks to this, Scottish business expanded
Endlessly. His head grew toby-jug-shaped,
Ideal for keyrings. He'd always worn brogues.
Ate bannocks in exile. As a wee boy he’d read The Beano.
His name brought new energy: our culture was solidly based
On pride in our hero, The Universal Scot.

ALT

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180d

How I write – in conversation with Imtiaz Dharker
19 March, free online (optional donation)

Imtiaz Dharker will discuss her work, career, & creative routines with poet & Chair of the Society of Authors Poetry & Spoken Word Group, Dean Atta

@writingcommunity

https://societyofauthors.org/event/how-i-write-in-conversation-with-imtiaz-dharker/

#Scottish #literature #poetry #ImtiazDharker #writing #writingCommunity

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138d

We are the
Dream of
Eons waking,
Ancient yet
Ephemeral.

#poetry

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169d

I’m out here now
on the roof. Look!
I had to get nearer the sky,
For the city was too full of rooms
And I can’t be content with a window…

—Margaret Tait, “A Poem for a Morning”
published in Margaret Tait: poems, stories & writings (Carcanet, 2012)

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800173798/poems-stories-and-writings/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury #womenwriters #Orkney

A Poem for a Morning
Margaret Tait

I’m out here now
on the roof. Look!
I had to get nearer the sky,
For the city was too full of rooms
And I can’t be content with a window.

It’s too small a thing to accept the ready-made frame.
We builders must keep making our own cities.
Oh, please
Don’t fell the trees
For your city, because I need them for mine.

ALT

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168d

A Kick Up the Arts podcast

Nicola Meighan visits the Alasdair Gray Archive & talks to Scottish writers Rory Watson & Alan Bissett about the wonder of words, the magic of old photographs, & the power of listening to women’s voices

https://www.akickupthearts.org/blog-3-1/rory-watson-amp-alan-bissett

#Scottish #literature #poetry #fiction #drama #podcast

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168d

“On a wet and wintry afternoon in January, with the Braan in spate, licking the edges of the lower walkways, the work brings a kind of mammalian warmth to the dark and damp”

—Greg Thomas on walking Scotland’s Corbenic Poetry Path

https://artuk.org/discover/stories/the-rhythm-of-feet-walking-scotlands-corbenic-poetry-path

#Scottish #literature #poetry #walking

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167d

I wad ha’e gi’en him my lips tae kiss,
Had I been his, had I been his…

—“Mary’s Song”, by Marion Angus (1865–1946) – born #OTD, 27 March
published in THE TINKER’S ROAD and Other Verses (1924)

“She has an authentic voice straight out of the ballad tradition, an eerie shimmer to her best poems”
—Kathleen Jamie

https://digital.nls.uk/works-by-selected-scottish-authors/archive/129188342#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=12&xywh=-880%2C-256%2C3153%2C2337

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury #womenwriters #Scots #Scotslanguage

Mary’s Song
Marion Angus

I wad ha’e gi’en him my lips tae kiss,
Had I been his, had I been his;
Barley breid and elder wine,
Had I been his as he is mine.

The wanderin’ bee it seeks the rose;
Tae the lochan’s bosom the burnie goes;
The grey bird cries at evenin’s fa’,
“My luve, my fair one, come awa’.”

My beloved sall ha’e this he’rt tae break,
Reid, reid wine and the barley cake,
A he’rt tae break, and a mou’ tae kiss,
Tho’ he be nae mine, as I am his.

ALT

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170d

As I came over the Harden hill
A whaup on the moor was whistling shrill
In his pride to be first recorder
Of new life stirred in the sleeping ling
Of laughter and love and song—and Spring—
And the first blue day on the Border.

—Will H. Ogilvie, “The First Blue Day on the Border”
from The Border Poems of Will H. Ogilvie (John Murray Hood, 1959)

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/first-blue-day-border/

#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #poem #poetry #Spring