Friday, April 15, 2016


Happy that my Polphail Village poem is now up on the Scotia Extremis website which you can find here. It's been paired with a poem about the town of Cumbernauld by Irene Hossack.

I've just received and gone through the proofs for my Mary Stuart poem which will be published in Poetry in the June issue. I'm so excited about it, the proofs look great!

It's a strange feeling having submitted the new collection and now thinking where to begin again. When Tree Language was published I was in the middle of being mentored by Vicki Feaver which forced me to keep writing and was invaluable for helping me to open up my poems.
I have the ever pressing desire to work on something bigger. I so enjoyed writing the longer poems and sequences in Madame Ecosse - of really being able to throw myself into a theme / subject.
At the moment I'm rereading The Golden Bough by James Frazer - doing a close reading of it, plus Roethke's Collected and D.H Lawrence. Also reading The Divided Self by R.D. Laing which is a fascinating study, published in the 1960's, of mental illness through existential philosophy.