Making Space for Water

Making Space for Water is a collaborative project between science and the arts, funded by Creative Scotland and Scottish Natural Heritage as part of Imagining Natural Scotland. Upstream, a poetry pamphlet, is one of several outputs. Some of the poems have also become postcards.

If you would like a pamphlet or postcard(s), please email.

 

FLOOD

Later, as the water rose
and rose, breathing in, spilling over

she stopped thinking and, swallowing the sunlight
let her life seep out :

soft spoons and watches, glassy buttons
cups and broken saucers run through

now clean as waterweed
in long eddies of seed and silt,

the tremors on her face
passing through like clouded rain

her doll eyes blue and full
as years and minutes flow away downhill

 

UPSTREAM
from Ainslie’s map of Angus 1794

caldhame
clayholes
greenford
mosstown
greenlaw
rushymyre
segwell
heughhead
loch eye
long haugh
fagreens
sweetyburn
claypotts
downy brae
welland
dry tree

Beyond the Map

Published by Mariscat Press, 2012.

From the early 19^th to the early 20^th century, Dundee was at the centre of the Arctic whaling industry. Ships left the Tay early in Spring, picking up provisions and additional crew in Orkney or Shetland, and arrived in the Davis Strait  or the Greenland Sea at the edge of the melting floe. As the whales were hunted out, they sailed further and further north, running greater risk of being caught out by the onset of winter, and becoming frozen in.

 These poems are an imaginary journey following the whalers up the east coast of Scotland to the Northern Isles and then into the frozen seas beyond.

GREENLAND LULLABY

 

Sleep, sleep my little bird

muffled in your winter blanket

songs are hidden in the dark

waken later in the sun

 

Muffled in your winter blanket

the ice will mouth words for you

waken later in the sun

curl back inside your bed

 

The ice will mouth words for you

words that you have never heard

curl back inside your bed

our memories are waiting for you

 

Words that you have never heard

sleep, sleep inside the snow

our memories are waiting for you

growing slowly into winter

 

Sleep, sleep inside the snow

sleep, sleep my little bird

growing slowly into winter

songs are hidden in the dark.

 

 

WALKING OUT

After days of waiting till the ice

took on the weight and substance of the sky

he clambered down, until he stood on fathoms

of grey water; its ceiling slightly veined,

opaque like marble, faintly breathing

with the edges of the tide far beneath.

And as he walked away, a darker hue

appeared : like late summer, blue and temperate :

a dull wind, a thin atlantic haze,

the easy lift of bare, turned fields,

worn and familiar, rising up to meet him ;

the deep autumn emptiness of home

as gradual water seeped into his shoes

his path leading out beyond the floe.

 

 

Published by Mariscat Press, Edinburgh. Price 5 pounds.  ISBN 0946588643

Auchmithie Calendar

Auchmithie Calendar. Twelve haiku, with drawings from Sarah Maclean.

January

winter comets.
our village is ice-bound,
the ground strewn with stars.

May

cod – saithe – ling
net and line
unraveled at high tide.

September

tall shadow in the grass ;
hare and rushes
round an old stone sun

Limited run. Copies from auchmithiecalendar@gmail.com . Price 5 pounds.

Ecstatics : a language of birds

Observing birds in their landscape : a collaboration with Orkney artist Laura Drever. Published by Brae Editions, Orkney.

Winner of the National Library of Scotland Callum Macdonald Award for Poetry Publishing in 2012.

 

heron

it is the shadow of itself;

it is its shadow.

first the shadow, then the bird.

 

wren

they hide in tree bark

in a branchy wood

of no rain.

 

lapwing

it hides in a fold of turf.

Its eyes are left behind.

 

Published by Brae Editions, Harray, Orkney KW17 2JS. Price 10 pounds. ISBN 1 907508 04 2  www.braeprojects.com

One Bird Flying : Poems from the Great Road

Beginning from readings of the journals of Marco Polo; written during nine months living in Dornod, Eastern Mongolia, near the Chinese border.

Runner-up in the National Library of Scotland Callum Macdonald Award for poetry publishing, 2010.

A WOMAN MAKES THE EARTH

A woman makes the earth

flat to hold her tent, her hard feet

pacing out its girth from hub to rim

round in the milky air.

Laying out the moons on the grass

she wraps herself in colours

as the ground wrinkles into hills

and sunlight slides towards her.

Her arms are brown as branches,

lifting a wall, hanging words and mirrors

the roof wheel’s shadow

spidering her butter lamps, her dresser

one eye open to the sun

as she felts the last bones

nodding to the brow of hills

crow-stepping into her shadow

a door in a bowl of wind

the sky stretched over.

 

Published by Mariscat Press. Price 5 pounds. ISBN 0 946588 64 3