Scottish writer and poet
Winter in Kiev
Explorations in West Ukraine, winter in Kiev, Paul Celan, a mother murdered in the Holocaust, so green the Ukraine, pavements of ice ...
Have you ever been to Romania?
Have you ever been to Romania? No? Neither have I! Yet when an editor asked for stories from Romania I came up with three.
A few lines of verse for early February
Lent is the period between Ash Wednesday and Easter, but it is also an old world for spring. February is still winter – and yet a hint of spring brings hope to the following poem.
From No Elegy
Home of the seagull, home of the oil, heartland of lost causes, heart’s dream of the exile, hoast of fawn-faced bronchitics, doomed on the dole...
Old stones, Mid-Argyll
This Christmas-tide between sleet and surfeit I lay my cheek against a stone’s harsh side. This petrified mother does not speak.
Elegy to the shtetlen
In 1947 Antoni Slonimski (1895 – 1976), a Polish poet of Jewish origins wrote a lament for the vanished small towns of Poland that were once predominately Jewish. A phrase from this poem, wrongly translated was chosen as a title for an illustrated guide to Jewish Poland. My husband, Stuart and I have just made a translation of Slonimski’s elegy.
Meditation for Advent
Advent is traditionally a time for meditating on last things. Sounds gloomy, but the point is that the winter solstice, the longest night, points towards lengthening light. The ancient dwellers of these islands knew it: Maes Howe in Orkney is built so that the solstice sun strikes to the heart of the burial mound. The Christian faith declares it. A rose is born in midwinter, the old carols declare. Advent heralds Nativity: new birth, new life, new hope. So although the following nocturne sounds a little bleak – it ends with light.
Peace
On a happier note the following poem celebrates the Nativity. It won first prize in this year’s Blue Butterfly Christian Poetry Competition and I am including it in my Christmas cards.
Clarissa
Clarissa is a new collection of poems, together with a prose account. The publisher, chipmunkapublishing is unique because it aims to give people with mental ill health - and their carers - a voice. Mental illness affects one in four, or even one in three of the population of the UK at some time or other in their lives. Severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, blights the lives of young people and devastates their families. One estimate says it has killed the potential of more young people than the two world wars put together.
Simply write
I wonder if you know about Robert Louis Stevenson. He lived in Edinburgh in the nineteenth century. His grandfather and his father designed and built lighthouses around the coast of Scotland. Young Robert wanted to build books, not lighthouses. But, if you think about it, a good book is a kind of lighthouse.
Clarissa is a new collection of poems, together with a prose account. The publisher, chipmunkapublishing is unique because it aims to give people with mental ill health - and their carers - a voice. Mental illness affects one in four, or even one in three of the population of the UK at some time or other in their lives. Severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, blights the lives of young people and devastates their families. One estimate says it has killed the potential of more young people than the two world wars put together.
I wonder if you know about Robert Louis Stevenson. He lived in Edinburgh in the nineteenth century. His grandfather and his father designed and built lighthouses around the coast of Scotland. Young Robert wanted to build books, not lighthouses. But, if you think about it, a good book is a kind of lighthouse.