I'm going to be Poet in Residence at Logan Botanic Garden!

Yes!  At last I'm allowed to shout about it!  I'm so honoured to be joining Gerry Loose, Mandy Haggith and Sue Butler as one of the four poets selected for the brilliant new project Walking With Poets, a partnership between the Scottish Poetry Library, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and Cove Park..  Each of us will have a month long writing and walking residency at our assigned Scottish Botanic garden, as well as a fortnight’s residency later on at Cove Park.

This fantastic opportunity has come about through the first aim of the Scottish Poetry Library: 'bringing people and poems together', and most appropriately, etched into the flagstone at the entrance to the Library,  Patrick Geddes's words 'by leaves we live'.

We will each work from an iPad (and yes, this is also rather exciting for me) for the duration of our residency, with which to contribute regularly to an online blog Walking With Poets, with photographs, poems and observations from the garden. We'll run writing workshops and guided walks for various age groups during our stay in the garden, providing endless opportunity for sharing the wonders of these extraordinary places with the people who come along.

From the start I've been madly obsessed with Logan Botanic Garden.  After 12 years living in Dumfries and Galloway I know it fairly well, and have always loved visiting it.  Because it's so strange - an exotic garden in the warm Gulf Stream, perched on the long, thin, green peninsula of the Rhins, at the very edge of Scotland, lapped by the seas.

And inside it, those palm trees sheltered by tall, dusty walls, which are all that remain of the old castle of Balzieland, said to have burned down at the end of the fifteenth century.

At the thought of waking up there, early on an August morning, my fingers itch for a notebook.

Figure in a Landscape by Anna Crowe

Mariscat’s simple, restrained production of Anna Crowe’s pamphlet is appropriate to this short collection of poems inspired by ‘Paisatge amb figueres’ (Landscape with fig trees), by Catalan sculptor Andreu Maimo.http://www.mariscatpress.co.uk/MariscatPress/Mariscat.html As it came out of the envelope I was immediately entranced by the rich dull ochre of the cover and the secretive density of Maimo’s drawing of fig leaves on the cover.

The poems are just as much a treat.  Anna Crowe has written in memory of her sister, but Maimo’s art provides the meditative focus for the poems.  I love the way both poet and artist  circle around and around the same theme, revisiting and re-examining.  The poems are deeply thought-about, and moving.  They often have an intense sadness and regret, but their exactness keeps them from any tilt towards sentimentality:

‘Thursdays were jours de conge
for girls of the Cour Bastide
so we hid among the branches
to watch the kids of the ecole communale
At break the boys would chase
long lines of girls
their screams of joy
(we knew we must never scream)
a froth of petticoats
that broke like surf
on our silent wall’ 

With ease the poems evoke landscape, climate and places of Mallorca and Marseille:

‘Fig trees in front of Can Cabana
their green skirts making tents of shade
in a field of shimmering wheat’

Explorations of childhood memory are set against the poet’s voice now, resonant with intelligence and resilience.  Wisdom, in fact.

Anna’s poem ‘Doves, fig tree and walls’ was chosen by Jen Hadfield as one of the ‘Best Scottish Poems 2010’.  Hurray, well deserved.  Here it is, complete.  What a fabulous last stanza: the sense of what’s gone still travelling, full of hope, not knowing its fate,

'High walls, mute, shuttered windows:
La Cour Bastide
In the shady yard at break
in the hubbub of strange language
others chalked the grid of la marelle
numbered the spaces 1, 2, 3
then halfway L'ENFER
then 4, 5, 6 to the dome at the end LE CIEL
Aiming the stone
we ventured our small attempts with
un…deux…cinq…six…
awkward as geese on bumpy ground
we tried not to land in hell
Throw by throw
words, whole phrases
crept from between the lines
trembled like lizards in the cracks of walls
then flew like the stone from our throats
Sometimes our words drew smiles
as kind as the fig tree
in the box-hedged garden
of Madame la Directrice
–A toi le tour! –A moi? –Oui, oui
Lance ta pierre! Vas-y!
 

But now you have thrown your stone
far beyond these walls
and I imagine it flying
like one of Andreu's doves
into that blue

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…