I haven’t received a poem yet from Kei Miller (if one arrives, I’ll certainly put it up here, but donating a poem isn’t obligatory), but here’s a link to one in the Cortland Review called <a href="http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/38/miller.html
” target=”_blank”>First Book of Chronicles. Pretty good!
I’m reading on Sunday, so here’s a poem – light verse, I suppose. It’s not in the forthcoming book and I doubt I’d send this to any magazine, so it may as well go here.
Credit Crunch
Economists agree a mousehole is a last resort,
but not without merit. Cheese is currency when money
has no object. It can’t buy even a crumb
of love and lacks the crunch of, for example, celery,
but comes freely available on kitchen floors.
What does it credit anyone to gain
a notional treasure, pay back
more than they’ve borrowed, and lose the lasting
tang of gorgonzola? A mousehole spans the bottom
rung on the cheese ladder. No interest so far.
The next readings at the Great Grog are on Sunday 12th October from 8pm. Here’s the first of four introductions to the readers:
Hamish Whyte was born near Glasgow where he lived for many years before moving to Edinburgh in 2004. He is a poet, editor, translator and former librarian. His most recent poetry publication is Window on the Garden (essence/botanic press) and a new collection is due from Shoestring Press in December 2008. He runs Mariscat Press, publishing poetry, and has edited many anthologies of Scottish literature. He is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Scottish Literature, Glasgow University, and was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Writing Fellowship in 2007. Currently reviewing crime fiction for Scotland on Sunday.
Angel, Torridon
Hi there, says the biker girl
in the garden of the last house
in Alligin, as I trudge past
with my new haversack
and silly sun hat. She smiles:
long red hair, big in leathers.
From the seat up the hill
I look back and see her
still standing at the gate
the Harley against the wall.
Michael Schmidt was born in Mexico in 1949. He was educated at Harvard and Oxford and is now Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow, editorial director of Carcanet Press and general editor of PN Review. He has written novels, poetry and literary history, and is an anthologist. The Resurrection of the Body is his most recent collection (Smith/Doorstop 2006).
‘His father was a baker . . .’
for A.G.G
His father was a baker, he the youngest son.
I understand they beat him, and they loved him.
His father was a baker in Oaxaca:
I understand his bakery was the best
And his three sons and all his daughters helped
As children with the baking and the pigs.
I can imagine chickens in their patio,
At Christmastime a wattled turkey-cock, a dog
Weathered like a wash-board, yellow-eyed,
That no one stroked, but ate the scraps of bread
And yapped to earn its keep. I understand
The family prospered though the father drank
And now the second brother follows suit.
I understand as well that love came
Early, bladed, and then went away
And came again in other forms, some foreign,
And took him by the heart away from home.
His father was a baker in Oaxaca
And here I smell the loaves that rose in ovens
Throughout a childhood not yet quite complete
And smell the fragrance of his jet-black hair,
Taste his sweet dialect that is mine too,
Until I understand I am to be a baker,
Up before dawn with trays and trays of dough
To feed him this day, next day and for ever —
Or for a time — the honey-coloured loaves.
(from ‘The Resurrection of the Body’)
Other readers on Sunday 14th September:
Helena Nelson
Dorothy Baird
Charlotte Runcie
Helena Nelson runs HappenStance Press in the small hours and at the weekends. By day she teaches Communication and English at Adam Smith College, Fife. She is both poet and critic. Her book-length collection is Starlight on Water, Rialto, 2003 and her more frivolous pamphlet is Unsuitable Poems, 2005, HappenStance.
Work
Born in the dark
shimmering, pure,
it wakes you at dawn.
Everything else is dirty beside it—
the swings, the play-park, the shoddy gardens.
Cold in its beauty, its calculation,
work shines clean.
Driven honour, harder than love.
Begin, begin.
The other September readers are:
Michael Schmidt
Dorothy Baird
Charlotte Runcie
Charlotte Runcie has been writing poems for almost three years now, after having won the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2006. She went on to win first prize in the Oxford University Christopher Tower Poetry Awards, and has since had her work published in several magazines across Scotland and England. She co-founded and now edits an online poetry magazine, Pomegranate, for young writers, and her first poetry chapbook will be published by tall-lighthouse in 2009. She is 19 years old and lives in Edinburgh.
Squirrels
We gather acorns from the grass,
each seed as round as hours, discuss the time
and how it moves; we head for trees
and lope along the ridged nut rivulets of bark
which creak and twist, mechanical; and hardwood cogs
are whirring backwards, shedding laughter lines.
We cling to all these days like frost,
our tails curled around the time
and necks of trees, coiled and weightless –
you say you sense the winter, smell the cold.
This stream will split by evening; minnows
breathe again. This air would break our lungs
so I sleep along the length of you, dreaming sundials,
our bodies hushed. We weave a downy helix. Then,
at dawn – November chimes with harder light – you stir
once, again, again. We slot
into the seasons every year,
unconscious, soft as clockwork.
(first published in Read This magazine)
Other readers for September 2008:
Michael Schmidt
Helena Nelson
Dorothy Baird
Dorothy Baird was born in Edinburgh but, after travelling and living abroad and in England for many years, came home to the city 19 years ago when the first of her three children was born. Her work has been widely published in magazines and anthologies and her first collection, Leaving the Nest, was published by Two Ravens Press last year. 4 of her poems were published in Two Ravens Press’s recent anthology, Cleave , which was Borders book of the month in June. She leads writing groups for adults and children, was Craigmillar’s Writer in Residency this year and is also a Human Givens therapist.
Badger Watch
It wasn’t so much the badgers
I’ll remember, though their shadowy
forms caught my breath
as they rustled in the earth mounds
and nosed in twigs and bluebells – no,
it was rather the waiting,
the five of us, faithful
to the silence we’d agreed on,
crouched downwind, while night
eased itself among the trees
and sheep coughed in distant fields,
when we learned the language
of each other’s face; how
in the sweeping dark
we dwindle to a beating heart,
and how in the long emptiness,
the sliver of hope still rises.
[published originally in Acumen and then in Leaving the Nest (Two Ravens Press)]
Other readers in September:
Summer is over, as the rain-soaked streets of Edinburgh have testified for the past month but, on the bright side, it means that Poetry at the Great Grog will shortly begin a new session.
I’ll post a full programme for the next year soon. There are still a few (very few) spaces to fill, but I hope to sort that out this weekend.
The next reading is on Sunday September 14th from 8pm, and it’s a terrific line-up. The Great Grog is at 43 Rose Street, Edinburgh. Click on the names to find out more.
Kapka Kassabova was born in Bulgaria in the 1970s, and at the end of the Cold War her family emigrated first to Britain, then to New Zealand. After twelve years and several books in New Zealand, she moved to Edinburgh in 2005.
Her first poetry collection, All Roads Lead to the Sea, won a NZ Montana Award for best first poetry book. Her first novel, Reconnaissance, won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Asia-Pacific, and she was twice named NZ Cathay Pacific travel writer of the year for her travel journalism. Two further poetry books are jointly published by Auckland University Press and Bloodaxe: Someone else’s life (2003) and Geography for the Lost (2007).
This year, she makes her UK prose debut with the darkly comic travel memoir Street Without a Name: childhood and other misadventures in Bulgaria (Portobello).
Ship Advancing in the Fog
(from Geography of the Lost)
I don’t know why
the sound of the horn was near,
and yet the ocean was not.
Fog obscures the visible
and purifies sound,
which is to say: when nothing
is clear, something anticipates it.
I stood outside the door
and listened to a cargo ship approach,
forge its way past sleeping houses
and muffled street-lights,
and I was strangely calm –
as in a dream where nothing
surprises you, not giant waves
advancing from a personal afar,
nor giant ships. You are too small to run,
you stand transfixed by imminent disaster,
waiting for it to be too late,
waiting to be delivered.
Taster No. 1 – Mike Stocks
Taster No. 2 – Eleanor Livingstone
Taster No. 3 – Jim Carruth
Jim Carruth has been described as Scotland’s leading rural poet and activist. He was born in Johnstone in 1963 and grew up on his parents’ dairy farm. After spending a period in Turkey he returned to live in Renfrewshire. He is the chair of St Mungo’s Mirrorball, a network of Glasgow-based poets and is an outreach committee member for the StAnza poetry festival.
His first collection Bovine Pastoral was runner-up in the Callum MacDonald Memorial Award in 2004. This was followed by High Auchensale (Ludovic Press 2006) and Cowpit Yowe (Ludovic Press 2008).
He has also collaborated with lino-cut artist Barbara Robertson on the illustrated fable Baxter’s old ram sang the blues.
The Moleman’s Apprentice
surfaced one Friday night
at the village hall
and asked her to dance,
leading the way
through the crowded floor,
parting couples
who closed in tight
behind them.
All evening she stared
into his small eyes
felt his first beard
soft furred
against her face,
but now that’s not
what she remembers
nor his dirty long nails,
his spade-like hands,
his proud boasting
that in a first week
measured in pelts
he had plucked the dead
from their dark;
instead it’s the incident
near the end,
when some joker
flicked a switch
cut the power,
his shudder and scream
as the night snapped shut.
Taster number 1 – Mike Stocks
Taster number 2 – Eleanor Livingstone
Poetry at the... 