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.

Snow, light, different days

It snowed again last Monday night, and on Tuesday morning 4 inches of snow creaked underfoot in temperatures of around minus 6.  The outdoor thermometer is read in a slightly approximate way by our household, because it blows away so often.  Still, it was obviously a very cold morning. 

We worked from home, and gave the boys a Snow Day.  Sledging and snow fighting were partaken of, though the snow was too cold and feathery to make good snowballs. The boys came in glittering with it.

Snow makes the world new.  It's so bright, in a dark month. It didn't last.

Sign of Summer

As this crab apple shed its leaves, the first bird's nest to be built in the trees we planted here 8 years ago has emerged.

I took the camera out early this morning when I let out the hens and fed the sheep.  It was minus 3, snow still lying.  The garden pond is solid, and the lochans below us frozen right across.  There's a young blackbird haunting the haybarn.  I'm not quite sure if it's ok, or just the cold is making it tamer than it would be.  It sits on the beams and watches me fill haynets. 

 

Snow in November

seems to have taken us all by surprise.  The hens are appalled. And I've started feeding hay to the sheep today, as there's really not much else for them to eat. 

By way of a total interior contrast, I'm reading 'Just Kids' by Patti Smith.  So as well as trudging over the creaking stuff in -6 degrees C this morning, I've been in the Chelsea Hotel, watching the young Patti Smith loitering in the foyer holding a stuffed crow, when in comes Salvador Dali, in a red-lined black cape.  He stops, stares, then pads over to Patti.  He remarks, "You are a crow, a gothic crow", and walks out again...

A poem called Snow, in anticipation of next month. 'Snow'is included in 'The Treeless Region', published this year from Ravenglass Poetry Press.

Snow

Snow fallen, frozen, melted, fallen.  Snow
laid up to the dykes like plumped-up pillows
at first light.  Each fencepost steeples
a white tower, while in the unclaimed stretches
in between, some sheep wool snagged on barbed wire
is hoar frosted like moss.

Snow fallen, frozen, melted, fallen.  Snow
in the wide field where moss pawed out by sheep
is hoar frosted like wool.  Deep prints say
the fox travelled the sheep-track last night.
This morning woodpigeons coo from the white wood.
The lane’s impassable.  It’s Christmas Day.

A windy week in a book

Some time back I bought an Andrew Greig novel by mistake. I hoped I was buying an Andrew Taylor novel but memory didn't serve before I got to the checkout. The unwitting victim of this disappointment, the Andrew Greig book (which happened to be 'In Another Light') went to rest on a shelf while I went back to reading other things.

Last week, I finished something else and drifting along the bookcases in search of inspiration, picked up 'In Another Light' again. I've had a great week. Even the weather was enhanced. Andrew's book has provided a space in my head for sweltering days in Penang before the War, laid closely alongside his narrator's winter in Orkney. All the while (obviously in sympathy with the Orkney section, day followed day of gales, and darkness and the horizontal rain Dumfriesshire does so well). But at least I got to spend time in Penang as well. And Greig makes Orkney sound actually worse. Liked the bit about salt and seaweed plastering the windows in the morning.

But weather aside, I love this book. Memorably, beautifully written (he's a poet too, and words are used thoughtfully, sparingly and to effect) I've been completely immersed in Greig's characters. His narrator is middle aged and has just survived a life-threatening brain trauma, in the course of which he experiences a vivid encounter with his long-dead father. On his recovery, he takes up a short contract job in Orkney, and is gradually drawn into researching for traces of his father's time in the far east. Eddie knows little of his father, who effectively tidied away his life, and that little is challenged by discovery of a long-ago scandal in Penang. Meantime, life in Orkney provides him with an acceptance and community Eddie craves, but also the challenge and risk of a not-quite relationship with a vibrant, clever, reckless woman, Mica.

Laid alongside Eddie's story and his gradual discoveries, Greig tells us what did happen in 1930 to Eddie's father in Penang. Which is a tale of class and broken rules, as Sandy, impoverished Scottish doctor meets two beautiful sisters in the goldfish-bowl ex-pat society of Penang.

I've reached that point where I could finish this novel in an upsettingly short space of time, and am consciously slowing down. Both Orkney and Penang are vividly, atmospherically created, and I'm so enjoying the counterpoint and balance of this father and son's exploration of how to deal with death (one has just survived WWI, the other his illness) and the risks taken in love, both in youth and middle age.

I'm very slow, really. This book did win the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award a few years ago. Should pay attention.

Black Umbrella

One afternoon of gusts and fields,
whirling a black umbrella
with a broken wing, he peacocked
on the climbing frame.
It was a one-off,my lucky snap
of his grey-pink sky,
some story he was telling,
about a kid who could fly.

Plastic earrings for sheep, and musing on Radio 4

Pearl, before the plastic earrings

Listening to Radio 4, driving into work yesterday morning.  There was a hard frost, and a blue sky.  Someone was talking about her work with prisoners, and how she saw one of her tasks is to try to help some of these people invent a new life story for themselves.  This is such an everyday activity, but so remarkable.  Every day we all do add dimensions to the story we tell ourselves of our lives.   We try to make sense of it, find evidence to support our story arc, believe in it, develop sub-plots, arrange evidence. And then it can all be changed, sometimes in an instant. And we have to start again.

Later, tagging sheep in near darkness.  New regulations require each sheep to have a standard tag and a matching electronic tag.  (That way the government can tell if they've been trained by Al Quaida).  Poor little sheep have ears full of plastic now, but they're legal.