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...

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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It must be in the stars...

The Bull Mask in Newton Stewart Museum


Now he sees what
the bull sees: two dim
curved worlds.
He swings his head
and now and then
a horn of daylight splinters
from the edge.

The wayward laws of serendipity have introduced me to artists Jo Hodges and Robbie Coleman, who have been appointed artists in residence for the Galloway Dark Skies Park and Galloway and South Ayrshire Biosphere.

The Forest near the Buchan Burn


...We breathe in oak air, laced
with draughts of peat and the sudden
swing of a jay.

My new collection, 'The Dark Farms', published by Roncadora Press, will be launched with a reading at Wigtown Book Festival on Wednesday 3 October, as part of the Festival's Dark Skies strand.   I had a great meeting with Jo and Robbie, who are planning a variety of curious and interactive ways to introduce the Dark Skies Park to festival-goers, and we're developing a collaboration which looks really exciting.  For more click here.

I spent 8 months of 2011 walking in the Forest, exploring ruins, talking to residents, poring over old maps and books and (while dodging some of last summer's rain) delving in Newton Stewart Museum.  I became completely absorbed by this remote, roadless place where hill farming is shrinking back off the high ground, and farms are abandoned, in some cases disappearing completely, except for a placename on a map, under the commercial forest plantings that have been put in during the second half of the 20th century.  The nights are very black, and very starry, with an extraordinary lack of light pollution.

Bricked up farm at Glenhead

...I touch raw breezeblock

mortared where the panes should be.

The same for every window, every door.

In every room, the dark's walled in.

Thornhill - where nicknames meet fonts over coffee

Today I nipped into lovely Thomas Tosh in Thornhill to catch a wall of fonts and dreadful puns.  'Local Types' is the creation of Hugh Bryden, which he bills as "some nicknames from Thornhill and the surrounding area, visually interpreted".  Local Types is still stuck to the wall until 14th July, and you would like it.

The dignified exterior of TT on a grey July afternoon

Local Types in all their splendour.  Excellent coffee too.

John 'Nails' Findlater: he nibbled them off

Nicknames better than carbon dating

Buy one!  They're only cheap.  Smile through your excellent coffee.

Who says life in the country is slow?

Of poems and canapes

Well, Roncadora and The Green Tea House in Moniaive are a wholly delicious combination. Not often enough are words inadequate to describe canapes, but they were on Saturday.
Hugh's art covered the big wall, the woodburner glowed on the other and all the little tables and rush-seated chairs were filled with poetry lovers. 

Andrew Forster read from 'Territory' and 'Digging' (after he'd reminisced about the lovely food he'd eaten in The Green Tea House when he was D&G's Lit Dev Officer).  Andy's work weighs every word carefully in its beautifully conversational cadences.  A treat.

Rab Wilson read from his recent collection 'A Map for the Blind' and from '1957 Flying Scot'.  All about a bike - and a passion:  'Finely bred racing greyhound of a bike'.  This Roncadora work of art comes with cds of Rab speaking, and saxophonist Ben Bryden playing the music he wrote for Rab's words.  (I'm listening to it now).

Hugh McMillan, widely acknowledged as a brilliant reader.  You brace yourself to laugh till it hurts (the letters excusing attendance at Culloden etc, due to difficulties with Apex tickets and the like. 'My heart bleeds in this Travelodge'.).  But Hugh does much more than funny.  He writes unerringly along some risky brink.  I often find it heartbreaking.  Look out for Hugh's New and Selected - A Thin Slice of Moon, published by Roncadora, and out Very Soon.

Hugh Bryden's listening.  But he did read too, (there's nothing Hugh B can't do).  Everyone liked the seagull poem (one for Dumfries, you see).  It went:
Seagull
Sees gull
Seize gull

Here I am, reading from 'Lost at Sea'.  I do look as if I've just noticed a very large spider approaching across the ceiling, mid-line. 
But it was a lovely chance to try out new poems from 'The Dark Farms'.  I kept noticing how ghostly they are. I do hope they were scary. Here's a few lines from 'Names Spoken in Kirk':

And by the light of elder stars
I know the people of this kirk
have slipped their names.

O constellations hear our prayer.
There's no wood in this kirk any more.
It eyes the sky.  It's purely stones and air.

Roncadora Poets read in The Green Tea House Sat 3 March

I'm looking forward to reading among the talent and bone-dry wit of the Roncadora Poets in what must be one of the most perfect settings for verse - The Green Tea House in Moniaive. We're all published by Dumfries and Galloway’s award-winning Roncadora Press and will endeavour to woo and wow you on Saturday 3 March at 7pm. Tickets are £6, available from 01848 200099.

Here's the infamous team photo (as once captioned by Hugh McMillan: 'Roncadora are a family firm purveying mutton pies, butteries, mince rounds and bread and butter puddings. The present board of directors, photographed here, pride themselves on providing high calorie fare for the most discerning of palates."  Speak for yourself Hugh.).

More truthfully, you, the audience, can expect varied and engaging poetry helpfully complemented by a free glass of wine and canapés created by The Green Tea House. Hot drinks will also be available.

Roncadora Press is owned and managed by Hugh Bryden, renowned artist, teacher, writer – and increasingly well-regarded publisher. Roncadora Press was shortlisted in 2008 for the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award for Pamphlet Poetry with Hugh’s own pamphlet ‘If Ah Could Talk tae the Airtists’; then won the prize in 2009 with well- published poet Hugh McMillan’s ‘Postcards from the Hedge’, and was shortlisted again in 2011 with Jean Atkin’s ‘Lost at Sea’.

Roncadora has also been successful in the prestigious Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet competition, shortlisted in 2010 with ‘Devorgilla’s Bridge’ by Hugh McMillan and again in 2011 with a selection of work by the poets reading at this event.

The reading at the Green Tea House will feature work by Jean Atkin, Hugh Bryden, Andrew Forster, Hugh McMillan and Rab Wilson. We'll read from recently published work, but promise also to provide a taster of new poems on their way to publication, in a conversational evening.

 

Scotland's Poetry Capital

I've returned from my first visit to St Andrew's and StAnza 2011, head spilling over with words.  It's felt like a long weekend because so much was new and so much was going on, and now I'm back, a short one.

The town seemed almost constantly sunny, crowstepped, winding, full of people.  Hey, it's nice, though I did think the high-end shopping must reflect the royals-at-uni element.   

The only regular festival dedicated to poetry in Scotland had chosen as themes for 2011 Timepiece and The Poet's Ark.  Certainly I heard great discussions of history in poetry - and some great poems - at a delicious Poetry Breakfast (pastries, poetry and coffee, I rest my case).  And interesting thoughts about how writing about place implicitly invites us to write about time.  And Polly Atkin did a great reading (at pointblank range, standing in for a missing poet) which addressed the Ark.   Eerie, feral foxes and a wonderfully exact little poem I've heard before featuring frogs in a child's red tin wheelbarrow.

A treat for me was to be there with what Hugh Bryden calls the 'Roncadora Stable'.  www.hughbryden.com  Roncadora featured in the StAnza programme as one of the invited exhibitions ‘Black and White’, which was installed in the picturesque – and appropriate – half timbered surroundings of the Trust House Museum. 

Rab Wilson and Hugh McMillan both read on the main programme.  Rab was launching not only his new pamphlet (though that is too small a word for this creation) ‘Ye’re There Horace!’, a Scots version of Horace’s Odes, but also his great new collection from Luath, ‘A Map for the Blind’.  (I still want one Rab).

Hugh McMillan’s reading was likewise at sell-out, with the audience emerging still grinning.  His new Roncadora pamphlet, a nifty version of drystone origami, ‘Cairn’ is a bit of a beauty.

Andy Forster, who was Literature Development Officer in D&G for 5 years before he went off to work for The Wordsworth Trust over the border in Cumbria, was at StAnza with his lovely Roncadora pamphlet ‘Digging’.  He was very good at being there for the craic, too.    

I went to see my Roncadora pamphlet, ‘Lost At Sea’, looking beautiful in an old fashioned glass-topped museum case in the Trust House Museum.  I met many new friends in the space of three days, and was made very welcome.

From Catriona Taylor's 'A Thousand Sails' inspired by Sorley McLean

 Sleep was short and the gaps between readings, workshops, exhibitions, discussion groups and talking a lot in the café-bar were extremely short.  Highlights were the Poet’s Market, the SPL's gigantic Knit A Poem (it’s a Dylan Thomas poem and would cover a village green), Philip Gross, Ciaran Carson, Douglas Dunn, Marilyn Hacker, Catriona Taylor’s gorgeous exhibition ‘A Thousand Sails’ inspired by Sorley McLean, and more…

'Lost At Sea' launches (no tacking)

The grey waters of Hugh Bryden's beautiful treatment of my 'Lost At Sea' saw their official launch last week.  Gracefield Arts Centre Cafe was so packed out for me and Andy Forster (launching the excellent 'Digging') that more chairs were scurried for.  Oh it cheers you up so much when you're about to read.

I realised on the way to the event, packed into a car in the murky dark of February with rather a lot of my family, that 'Lost At Sea' is a kind of travelogue.  It proved to be one of the easiest readings, because of this, I think - it has its own internal narrative, in which both the Shetland Islands and my great grandfather and his family are explored, and glimpses caught of them.

My 82 year old mum came along, and it was lovely to read to her, as she has done all the family research that I have (rather) plundered.  She kept beaming at me.  I found reading 'The Ditty Box of Thomas Gilbert Hunter Aiken' to be a strange kind of crux, as it contains many of the fragments of story that come down the generations.  I suppose this is how our lives are likely to be summarised.  And they're not likely to be so adventurous. 

I've got his telescope safe.  But will I one day have to decide whether to keep that charts table?

The Ditty Box of Thomas Gilbert Hunter Aiken


That he left Church Closs
and his mother and stowed
away on a Tyne collier
at thirteen, dodging on board
in the wash and blow
of Lerwick harbour.

That sometimes he ate
ships biscuits so maggoty they
shuffled across his plate. That he sailed
round the Horn. That he shivered
one winter on a vessel held ice-bound
for weeks in the Baltic.

That he was wrecked
in the tide-race of Ushant, rescued
by a brig bound for Cuba and dropped
at the mouth of the Tagus to row
under Torre de Belem
into white-paved Lisbon.

That in Valparaiso he
punched a man and knocked him
overboard and then
jumped in and saved him. 
That he married twice but no-one
ever mentioned the first time.

That he had a strong face, a trim beard
and fierce eyebrows.  His eyes look far
past my shoulder.  That we know this
from a photograph.  And also have his telescope,
his drawing instruments and his cut-down,
hacked-about charts table.

That he lived to see his sons survive the War
and held his grandchildren, as babies.
That his sextant and the ditty box went missing
at last, in the bombing of Liverpool
in 1940.  That he never
went back to Lerwick.

Stones, Motels and Roncadora Press

Graham Fulton reading from Black Motel



Hugh McMillan reading Cairn



The cafe bar at Gracefield Arts Centre was filled with laughing people this evening, who just now and again emitted The Pause, followed by The Slight Sigh.  So it was cracking good poetry from Graham Fulton, visiting us from Paisley, and from Hugh McMillan, who must have rowed in from Penpont.

Roncadora Press has its beautiful work all over the walls.  There was Rab's 'Horace's First Buik o Satires', and Andy Forster's 'Digging', the Devorgilla Bridge (that got its piccy in The Guardian last year) and John Burns' new pamphlet with the glorious coloured cover. Hugh B has made such an amazing job of 'Lost At Sea' that I feel no shame at all standing in front of it admiringly. 

Lost At Sea

Today I got a first proper view of what my new pamphlet with Roncadora Press is going to look like.  And it's entirely beautiful, thanks to the skill and artistry of Hugh Bryden.  It's 4 metres long, folded into zig-zags, with the skyline of Shetland running right through it, and the poems 'floating' in the shifting sea. 

The sea really looks as if it's shifting and has light glancing off it, due to the aforementioned artistry.  This photo is just a wee bit like it.  Hugh has done less sky and much more sea.  But the linear feel is about right.  It's off to the printers next week. 

Coincidentally I came home from work to find a copy of 'New Shetlander' on the kitchen table, sent because they've kindly published two of the poems which will be in 'Lost At Sea'.  Here's one of them.

Telescope

Dark wood polished by use and damaged
down one side, it’s been
familiar to my touch since childhood.
He must have known its balance
intimately, weighed it in decisions,
fingered the fine milled edges of its eye.
All through his grainy, deck-tilt years
he shut it safe away.   

I learned to tweak with a fingernail
the tiny pin on the metal shutter
which slides back to reveal  
the eyepiece just as
I’m pulling on the casing, shlunck
shlunck, and this
neat cubit passes me
the vision of a sea eagle.

Far back through the glass
a wide grey sea and slant
of rain, a rig of swaying furrows,
medallions of salt, each stamped
by some small imperfection on the lens,
a whorl and ripple that lays
a long century
between my eye and his.