Eggplant.place

96d

When you have walked through a town, as an infantryman
you’ll never go through streets the same way again…

—Colin McIntyre (1927–2012), “Infantryman”
Published in FROM THE LINE: Scottish War Poetry 1914–1945

https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/volumes/from_the_line/

#Scottish #literature #poem #DDay #poetry #WarPoetry #WW2

Infantryman
by Colin McIntyre

When you have walked through a town, as an infantryman
you'll never go through streets the same way again.

There is shoulder-ache from rifle-sling, and sore
butt-bruise, of bolt, on hip and thigh.

The walk comes somewhere between slope and slow hike,
a wary step, splay-footed, as drawers cellular,
catch in the crotch, twist centrifugally around.

Our lot moved at slow deliberate plod, eyes down, look out,
Ted walked on the left, looks right; I took the right,
looked left. Well spaced out, bloody tired all the time.

Ted and I had a reputation, in Four Section, for hitting
the deck, together, quick as a flash, at the first shell.
Ted had a nose for crossroads ranged by guns.

Infantrymen grow fat in later years, from never walking.
Ted would have become quite gross. But Ted's dead.
Stepped on an AP mine in champagne country.
Cheers, Ted, you old sod, you.

ALT

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107d

From the Scottish Poetry Library archives: poet & novelist John Burnside discusses fellow Scottish poet W.S. Graham. During the talk, recorded at the National Library of Scotland, Burnside talks about poetry & visual art, the poet as nomad, & “feeding the dead”

https://splpodcast.podbean.com/e/john-burnside-on-ws-graham

#Scottish #literature #poetry #visualart #poets #JohnBurnside #WSGraham

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96d

We’re the D-Day Dodgers out in Italy,
Always on the vino, always on the spree…

—“The Ballad of the D-Day Dodgers”, a WW2 soldiers’ song collected by Hamish Henderson
Sung by Rod Paterson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDXoXx7RRWs&list=OLAK5uy_lyHb3w_CdLiyDsHl84M6obGIoyIc2Ydl4&index=2

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #song #soldiers #DDay #warpoetry #Italy

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94d

as we find a way to wipe your armpit
without lifting your arm up and away

you say, you’ve never seen me so (I forget
the word you use and replace it with close

as in, we’ve never been so close) and I say
I was thinking that…

—Kathrine Sowerby, “about your armpit”
published in GUTTER 28

A poem for #Pride 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/about-your-armpit/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Pride #Pride2025 #LGBTQ

about your armpit
Kathrine Sowerby

as we find a way to wipe your armpit
without lifting your arm up and away

you say, you’ve never seen me so (I forget
the word you use and replace it with close

as in, we’ve never been so close) and I say
I was thinking that—it’s because, you say

I didn’t want you near what wasn’t my body
(I’m putting it into words before I forget)

there isn’t much space between the stiff
compression vest and your arm but I ease

the cloth in and two days later I’m thinking
of the word honour, as in what an honour

which is not a word I often use and I wonder
what you would say, if you knew I was writing

about your armpit

ALT

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107d

The Scottish anthropologist who inspired Dracula

“More decidedly evil is the nosferatu, or vampire, in which every Roumanian peasant believes as firmly as he does in heaven or hell…”

—from THE LAND BEYOND THE FOREST: Facts, Figures, & Fancies from Transylvania (1888), by Airdrie’s own Emily Gerard. Gerard’s work was a key part of Bram Stoker’s research materials for Dracula.

#DraculaDay 🧛‍♂️

https://crimereads.com/the-scottish-anthropologist-who-inspired-dracula/

#Scottish #literature #Romania #Vampire #Dracula

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107d

On a quiet riverbank a boy meets a stranger going through a rough patch, as the two keep tabs on a controversial rewilding project

Currently on BBC Sounds: “The Give & Take”, by Linda Cracknell

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002bv3p

#Scottish #literature #drama #radiodrama #rewilding

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94d

To quote my distant friend Imran MacLeod,
“A man with no culture has no identity”…

—Hamid Shami, “Lost”
published in Wish I Was Here: a Scottish multicultural anthology (pocketbooks, 2000)

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

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #multiculturalism

Lost
Hamid Shami

To quote my distant friend Imran MacLeod,
‘A man with no culture has no identity.’

The last I heard of him was, he was off
To the Himalayas.

He had a very confused childhood.

Father was Scottish,
Mother Pakistani.

They’d always be arguing over many things
Concerning him.

One was religion.

Father wanted him brought up
A Catholic; mother wanted a Muslim.

Was the only boy on our street who went
To mosque on Fridays and chapel on Sundays.

But in the mountains

God’s sure to find him.

ALT

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107d

Mrs Bram Stoker’s recipe for “Dracula Salad” – published in CRUDEN RECIPES & WRINKLES (Cruden Parish Church, 1912), & contributed shortly after Bram Stoker’s death – via Mike Shepherd on Facebook

#DraculaDay 🧛‍♂️

https://www.facebook.com/groups/scotlit/posts/10161485849160090/

#Scottish #literature #BramStoker #Dracula #recipes #Salad

Part of a page from Cruden Recipes and Wrinkles (1912). The paper is old and slightly spotted with age.

Salads, Sauces, &c.

SALAD.
(Mrs PIRIE, Bank House, Lonmay).
Wash and pick two heads of lettuce. Shred them, and add the white of a hard boiled egg cut in rings. Pound the yolk. Add a little salt, a large teaspoonful of made mustard, one breakfastcupful of cream, and a little vinegar. Mix well. Pour over the lettuce, and turn over the whole a few times with a spoon and fork. If liked a few slices of tomato may be added.

THE "DRACULA" SALAD.
(Mrs BRAM STOKER, 26 St George's Square, London, S.W.)
Arrange alternate slices of ripe tomatoes, and ripe, purple, egg-shaped plums in dish, and dress with oil and vinegar French dressing.

BREAD SAUCE.
(Mrs J. SMITH, Easterton, Peterhead).
1/2 pint milk.
2 cloves.
1 small onion.
2 oz. bread crumbs.
Pepper and salt.
1 oz. butter.

Stick the cloves in the onion. Put the milk in a saucepan. Add the onion, and set at the side of stove for half an hour. Warm it, but do not boil. Shake out the onion and add the crumbs, butter, salt, and a good pinch of pepper. Stir until the bread crumbs have absorbed the milk.

ALT

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96d

Ye think thon wes the end?
Yon meetin in the wuids
When Thracian Orpheus heard the drum, the cries,
The whud o the bacchantes’ thrangan feet…

—“Orpheus”, by Tom Scott (1918–1995), born #OTD, 6 June
Published in A KIST O SKINKLAN THINGS

1/3

https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/volumes/a-kist-o-skinlan-things/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Scots #Scotslanguage #20thcentury #Mythology #GreekMythology

Tom Scott
Orpheus

Ye think thon wes the end?
Yon meetin in the wuids
When Thracian Orpheus heard the drum, the cries,
The whud o the bacchantes’ thrangan feet
And, seik in saul,
Mad to be jyned for aye to his Eurydikee,
Strung his harp
And gaed to meet them wi a sang.
Ye think thon wes the end?

Na. Eftir the thrang breeled on, red
Fingert, bluidie-mawed, the riven limbs
Quiveran aye amang the mairtyred gress,
There wes a lull
And throu it syne a roun
And syne as muckle’s a moan
And syne a voice,
Yon voice o his
That quietit the forest and its fowk,
That reconcilit lion and lamb,
Ordert the rain,
Spoke frae the grund
And threept in the greitan tree
‘Euridikee! Euridikee!’

And at the name
A ferlie thing wes duin.
Thir broken bits o bodie, bits o bane,
Brisket, gash, airm and droukit hair
Cam thegither as gin some will
Mair nor the merely real
Had wrocht on them.
And on yon slauchtert grund was formed
Orpheus anew,
Orpheus the singer, Orpheus the makar,
Orpheus cleansed o the auld despair.
And by the halie tree
In the leaman licht o the wuid,
Squired by a houlet, a hawk and a doo,
Wes his Euridikee.

They say he made a new sang,
A nobler nor the auld,
And sings it aye in the great haa o the warld.

They say it will nevir end.

ALT

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106d

You told me the brightest flowers grow on sand.

By the breakwater, a frayed nest of fishers’ rope
twined into a bouquet: pale blue, green, teal,
and peach; a twisted tale of what growth is…

—Jane McKie, “Rope”
Published in nobody remembers the birdman: New Writing Scotland 40 (ASL, 2022)

https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/newwriting/nws40/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry

Jane McKie
ROPE

You told me the brightest flowers grow on sand.

By the breakwater, a frayed nest of fishers’ rope
twined into a bouquet: pale blue, green, teal,
and peach; a twisted tale of what growth is.
But you are right – they are flowers in the way
of any weathered thing, unpicking itself,
or hollowing itself into something eye-catching,
essential: a split egg of rock, a breaking wave.

ALT

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106d

Robert Burns & Black Lives

24 June, Alloway. Free – booking recommended

Clark McGinn examines Burns’s connections to the transatlantic slave trade, highlighting the paradoxes & moral conflicts during the poet’s time. He does not shy away from uncomfortable truths, presenting a nuanced portrait that challenges readers to reconcile Burns’s literary genius with the ethical ambiguities of his time.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/highlight-talk-clark-mcginn-on-burns-and-black-lives-tickets-1354716606839

#Scottish #literature #RobertBurns #TransatlanticSlaveTrade #18thcentury

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106d

Behind the Scenes Tour at the Mitchell Library
14 June, Mitchell Library, Glasgow. Free, ticketed

An exclusive guided tour of the Mitchell Library – one of Europe’s largest public libraries. Dawn Vallance, Principal Librarian at the Mitchell Library, will lead a tour of the vast back stacks of the Mitchell, not usually accessible to the public.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/behind-the-scenes-tour-at-the-mitchell-library-tickets-1374282378589

#Scottish #literature #libraries #architecture #history #Glasgow #MitchellLibrary

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106d

Moscow is milling with watermelons.
Everything breathes a boundless freedom.
And it blows with unbridled fierceness
from the breathless melonvendors…

“Commended as a Russian translator… for his rendering of Mayakovsky into Scots, Morgan gets the muscles of the English language working with similar vigour in his treatment of Voznesensky”

—Carol Rumens on Edwin Morgan’s translation of Andrei Voznesensky

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/26/poem-of-the-week-selling-watermelons-by-andrei-voznesensky-translated-by-edwin-morgan

#Scottish #literature #translation #Russian #poem #poetry

Selling Watermelons
by Andrei Voznesensky
translated by Edwin Morgan

Moscow is milling with watermelons.
Everything breathes a boundless freedom.
And it blows with unbridled fierceness
from the breathless melonvendors.

Stalls. Din. Girls’ headscarves.
They laugh. Change bangs down. Knives —

and a choice sample slice.
— Take one, chief, for a long life!
Who’s for a melon?
Freshly split! —

And just as tasty and just as juicy are
the capbands of policemen
and the ranks of motor-scooters.
The September air is fresh and keen
and resonant as a watermelon.

And just as joyfully on its own tack
as the city-limit melon-multitudes,
the earth swings in its great string-bag
of meridians and latitudes!

ALT

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94d

This week; the sermon is salt
and the taste of it as song. A clean, cold burn

quickens the blood…

—A.M. Havinden, “Sea Chapel”
published in Break in Case of Silence: New Writing Scotland 39 (ASL, 2021)

https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/newwriting/nws39/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry

A. M. Havinden
Sea Chapel

This week; the sermon is salt
and the taste of it as song. A clean, cold burn

quickens the blood. Unseen, underfoot,
deep notes of wrack and weed wind

ankles. We raise our voices
in bright blasphemy, in shock and defiance

a hymn of human-scale endurance,
how great and small we are;

how outrageously alone; how far
we’ve come, suddenly, from shore.

ALT

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83d

Pink sand and sandpipers pink in the setting
sun and pink granite and the pink swirl
of green waves…

—“Camas Tuath”, by poet, playwright & novelist Tom Buchan (1931–1995) – born #OTD, 19 June

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/camas-tuath/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury

Camas Tuath
Tom Buchan

Pink sand and sandpipers pink in the setting
sun and pink granite and the pink swirl
of green waves: no mediterranean relics
here, no ruined amphitheatres, no amphorae,

no half-submerged statuary – only the
children’s wet sand-pies and a standing
stone, a druidic lingam standing for nothing
anyone knows about nowadays, a stony

finger, green with years, specific of an idea
which was no doubt straight, strong and complex
once, but is now obliterated by the hysterical
cries of children and the birds’ pink squealing.

ALT

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105d

Into perplexity: as an itch chased round
an oxter or early man in the cave mouth
watching rain-drifts pour from beyond

his understanding…

—“The Beautiful”, by Roddy Lumsden (1966–2020) – born #OTD, 28 May. A 🎂 🧵
Published in POETRY magazine, Dec 2008

1/5

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/51938/the-beautiful

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #RoddyLumsden

The Beautiful
by Roddy Lumsden

Into perplexity: as an itch chased round
an oxter or early man in the cave mouth
watching rain-drifts pour from beyond

his understanding. Whether to admire
the mere sensation, enough, or hold out
for sweeter ornament, vessels of wonder

born with that ur-charm of symmetry;
lovely ones we ache to prize and praise,
climb into and become because they try

our day-by-day significance: some of us
ugly and most of us plain, walked past
in the drowned streets: pearls of paste,

salted butter, secondary colors. They
drift unapproached, gazed never-selves,
blunt paragons of genetic industry. We

desire them but cannot want such order.
We stand, mouths open, and cannot help
stammering our secrets, nailed to water.

ALT

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92d

CFP: Foreclosure
a Special Issue of Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism

Theorising foreclosure in relation to British cultural production since 1960. The editors seek contributions on literary imagination, questions of genre & form, interpretive practices, & material conditions of cultural production

Deadline 18 July

@litstudies

https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/2025/06/09/call-for-contributors-foreclosure-a-special-issue-of-key-words-a-journal-of-cultural-materialism/

#Scottish #English #Welsh #Ulster #literature #Literarystudies #CulturalStudies

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104d

Aminatta Forna: Creative Conversations X UBelong
16 June, free online

A conversation with Aminatta Forna, award-winning author of the essay collection THE WINDOW SEAT: Notes from a Life in Motion, & more.

This event is part of the Building Solidarity & Kinship programme curated by Esraa Husain at the Refugee Festival Scotland 2025, developed in partnership with Creative Conversations and U Belong Glasgow.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/aminatta-forna-creative-conversations-x-ubelong-tickets-1387176776079

#Scottish #literature #solidarity #kinship #war #trauma

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92d

Lavender Menace: Queer Bookselling in Edinburgh
19 July, City Art Centre, Edinburgh. Free, ticketed

This talk explores the history of queer bookselling in Edinburgh, from the early bookstalls to the opening of Lavender Menace and West & Wilde to the resurgence of independent bookshops.

https://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/whats-on/lavender-menace-queer-bookselling-edinburgh

#Scottish #Scotland #LGBTQ #queer #bookselling #Edinburgh

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104d

The Long Shadow of Scottish Gothic
31 July, Glasgow
Tickets £13.44

From ‘Tam o Shanter’ through Jekyll & Hyde to Alasdair Gray & Muriel Spark, the Gothic has a vicelike grip on the Scottish imagination. Dr Valentina Bold & Prof Liam McIlvanney discuss Liam’s new psychological thriller THE GOOD FATHER, the enduring appeal of Scottish Gothic, & our fascination with the dark side

https://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/event/1/the-long-shadow-of-scottish-gothic-liam-mcilvanney

#Scottish #literature #gothic #RobertBurns #RobertLouisStevenson #AlasdairGray #MurielSpark

Edited 104d ago

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92d

“It didn’t occur to me for about five or six years after leaving school that literature was something I could be involved in. Then I discovered it was possible to write stories myself…”

—an extract from James Kelman on “Elitism & English Literature”, from a book I’m currently typesetting

#Scottish #literature #workingclass #writers #writing #JamesKelman #elitism

It didn’t occur to me for about five or six years after leaving school that literature was something I could be involved in. Then I discovered it was possible to write stories myself, I just had to go out and buy a couple of reliable ball-point pens and a good-sized notebook. I could even write stories about ordinary people if I wanted to. There wasn’t anybody going to stop me by using physical force. After that I found out there were other people in this country also doing such things, and there were other people who had been doing such things for a couple of hundred years. It was just that nobody in any of the positions of power in society had got round to telling me.

ALT

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104d

Kerri Andrews & Merryn Glover in conversation about Nan Shepherd
11 June, Pitlochry Festival Theatre – £3

Authors Dr Kerri Andrews & Merryn Glover discuss how Nan Shepherd has inspired their own walking & writing, followed by a book-signing & the matinee performance of Nan Shepherd: Naked & Unashamed

https://www.pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com/whats-on/merryn-glover-and-kerri-andrews-in-conversation/

#Scottish #literature #NanShepherd #walking #hillwalking #womenwriters

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92d

On Thursday 19th we will be celebrating the launch of Dark Crescent by #Edinburgh scribe @lyndseycroal , with tales inspired by #Scottish folklore, published by Luna Press
https://www.edinburghbookshop.com/events-1/lyndsey-croal-dark-crescent-book-launch

#books #livres #Edimbourg #Bruntsfield #LyndseyCroal #BookLaunch #BookEvent #AuthorEvent #DarkCrescent #Fantasy #Scotland #Ecosse #bookshops #librairies #bookstodon

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91d

Helen Craik (1751–1825), Gothic novelist & friend of Robert Burns, died 200 years ago #OTD, 11 June. Craik published 5 novels but no poetry. In 1919, excerpts of her poems appeared in a newspaper, but the source – a notebook Craik presented to a family friend – disappeared…

1/6

#Scottish #literature #18thcentury #romanticism #poetry #Gothic #WomenWriters #manuscripts

A manuscript page, headed

Poems
by
A LADY

Underneath is a paragraph in ornate copperplate handwriting (it's from Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, by Mr Yorick, vol. II):

Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our Joys, or costly in our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw—and ’tis thou who lifts him up to Heaven—Eternal fountain of our feelings, ’tis here I trace thee.—

Below is a drawing of a curly-haired cherub's face, with wings made of looping pen-strokes.

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91d

Afro-Scottish Poetry Event 2025
25 July, Glasgow. Tickets £0–£10

A multicultural evening of poetry, music, & storytelling that celebrates African & Scottish identities through powerful performances. Created & curated by Chisom Okoronkwo with U Belong Glasgow

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/afro-scottish-poetry-event-2025-tickets-1396145632169

#Scottish #literature #African #poetry #storytelling #performance #identity #Glasgow

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