Verse for the Salt Smugglers

I'm coming to the end of long, lovely project 'Viewpoint Voices', working with the National Scenic Areas Officer in Dumfries and Galloway.

We've taken many different groups of people, of different ages and backgrounds, up to the six viewpoints along this gloriously beautiful coast.  The youngest was 8, the eldest folk certainly in their 80s (I was too tactful to ask).  We created cinquains (like a slightly bigger haiku).  We're putting them together into video-clips of 'Viewpoint Voices', where you hear each participant read out their cinquain, set over images of the coast.  I will put them up.

I haven't often recorded anything I've written with these groups, but here's a cinquain for Gutcher's Isle, with its ruined laird's house and hall, its smugglers' bay, its legends of violent death and the threat of the excise men.

Cargoes
of salt we risked
at sea or sculled at night
through the stacks, our breathing shallow,
chancy.

Gutcher's Isle, near Rockcliffe, in summer, admittedly.

 

 

 

 

'The Crow House' is FREE this Saturday

Front cover of 'The Crow House'

Do help yourself to a FREE copy of The Crow House this Saturday 24 November.  You can download it for nothing to your Kindle/mobile devices/humble PC by clicking here.

Reviews appeal!  Earn my undying gratitude by posting a review on Amazon!  I gather that's what's needed to help The Crow House er, fly.



...Drifting past the table with the glass case, he was struck by both curiosity and rebellion.  He fished in the drawer for the key, and unlocked the top of the case.

This was strictly forbidden by Liddy.

Callum lifted the glass lid, and settled it carefully back as far as its hinges would allow.
The Grete Herball lay grandly in the safety of the case, not a very large book, but thick and impressively bound in high quality tooled leather, with gilt decoration.  He bent his head and sniffed appreciatively.   Then he did the banned thing, and opened the covers.

We launch 'The Dark Farms' in Dumfries - by candlelight

'The Dark Farms', Roncadora Press 2012

Roncadora Press are about to stage (and I think that's the right word) the Dumfries launch of 'The Dark Farms' on Wednesday 28 November.

I'm looking forward to reading poems about the night skies of the Galloway Forest by candlelight in the cafe at Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfries. 

The show starts at 7.30pm, free entry, and there Will Be Wine.

'The Dark Farms' will be read in a dark cafe...

The front cover of 'The Crow House'

The Crow House is my new novel for 9-12 year olds.  It's a mystery horror thriller set in Wigtown, a Georgian village by the sea - and Scotland's Book Town.  Click here to find photos and read an extract on The Crow House website. 

Time travel was never this inconvenient – or terrifying.  Holly and Callum have to cope with a dangerous old book, a witch (perhaps) and worst of all, the cold-eyed Hermetic Doctor of Wigtown: Jared Sliddery, inhabitant of The Crow House.

Hooked by the slow charms of Wigtown, I started writing The Crow House in 2005, when my eldest son was the right age.  By 2007 I had a finished first draft, which he read before getting on with growing up.  I managed to complete a second then third draft in time for my second son to read it in 2011 or so, and amid work, family, a smallholding and then a big house move involving three generations of us, I managed to thread my way through the formatting labyrinth to publish it on Kindle just in time for Halloween this year.  So - The Crow House is actually real and available from Amazon here.  
And you don't have to have a Kindle, actually - you can download it straight from Amazon to your pc.

If you do read it, and like it, then please do leave a little review or share to your FB friends.  I'd love to hear from readers.

Wigtown is full of irresistible front doors... 

On discovering Nantucket and the Angel

I found it in the public library.  Let's hear it for Britain's embattled public libraries!  I opened the book by the shelves and was gripped from the first lines of Gillian Allnutt's prologue:
'the saints set off without their woolly vests
the little saints set off into the snow
they leave behind their hagiographies
but humbly take their shoes'

Her words plunged me instantly into another space, the long ago of other kinds of purpose.  She reflects on age, other generations, spiritual life and the way it catches on objects and places.  There is humour too, in incongruity and a keen, wry, sense of the ridiculous.

This now out-of-print collection from Bloodaxe, published in 1997, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot.  Allnutt's preoccupations of secular and sacred thread the work, many poems step one from another with a linking word or thought.  The poems are close-ups, often invocations.
'Half lovely is the little morning light
in patches.
I have brought Harriet's sleeve to gather
in running stitches.'
(My heart unsettled)

The half-rhymes are characteristic, and fantastically crafted -
'There is the big yellow bucket of weed and wedding.
There on the hill are the wet stars wading.
There is Rembrandt's mother reading.'
(Ennui)

Or from the gorgeous, intoning poem 'On hesitating to depict my grandmother' -
'Her stone's among the stones
of gentlemen within the wall, the toll
of bell, bird-chortle.
But she's flown.'

Bloodaxe do help you in a bit.  This is the 'spiritual biography of Allnutt's imagined 90 year-old 'elder ego' Nantucket, and her impact on a too-long-lingering angel Gabriel as he falls under her mad spell'.
(There's a poem where the angel takes himself off the cathedral and rolls himself a fag, and lights a candle for Nantucket's soul).

I've renewed it once already.  I'll have to find a copy.

A Move with The Crow Road

Caught in the mayhem of moving house, heartstrings still twanging for Scotland, and because I found it when finding anything in a couple of hundred brown boxes was a small marvel, I've been reading (well, re-reading - but it was a long time ago) 'The Crow Road' by the very fine Iain Banks.

The one that starts 'It was the day my grandmother exploded.'

What an extraordinary canter through a coming-of-age experience - a family so gothically packed with eccentrics, missing people, wife-beaters, runaways, atheists, poets and as it turns out, murderers.  Satisfying, of course, that it's a member of the posh end of the family who eventually turns out to have gone so thoroughly to the bad.  On the way you can't help noticing the phenomenal amount of alcohol - and more - that accompanies the revelations and (frequently) catastrophic decisions taken by our youthful protagonist.  But you have to love him, and all the many and various voices of this novel.

Still a great read, and a truly helpful distraction from the personal chaos inflicted on my family by British Telecom.  Two months and still no phone...

Launch of 'The Dark Farms'

I've been happily distracted for a couple of days creating a slideshow for my reading at Wigtown Book Festival on Wednesday 3 October when my new pamphlet from Roncadora Press, The Dark Farms, will be officially launched. 

The Dark Farms focuses on the Galloway Forest Park, its depopulated glens, shrinking agriculture and extraordinarily dark skies.  I worked on The Dark Farms for eight months during 2011, walking the Forest, talking to residents and reading old books and maps.  I also spent quite a few hours dodging 2011’s steady rain in Newton Stewart Museum, which was where I first encountered the Bull Mask, and the Necklace of Horse's Teeth.

What emerged is poetry about very remote places; saturated stones; the ghosts of sheep; the vast night skies.  I took photos of abandoned sheepfolds, farms with their windows bricked up, rotting carthorse stalls.

Award-winning publisher Roncadora Press is owned by artist Hugh Bryden, who has created a handmade ‘black book’ for The Dark Farms, complete with black edged pages, poems lit only by stars and an embossed front cover.  If so moved, you can buy it at Wigtown Book Festival and then via www.hughbryden.com.

The Dark Farms is  in the Main Hall in the County Buildings at 1.30pm, tickets cost £6.  Please book via the Book Festival website - click here.

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