Kathleen Jamie is the author of several poetry collections, including The Queen of Sheba, The Tree House and The Overhaul, and three essay collections, Findings, Sightlines and Surfacing. She became the Scots Makar in 2021.
Under the gutter of our house are many cobwebs, each attached at a slightly different angle to the wall. It’s an east-facing wall, so on sunny mornings the cobwebs are alight. A whole quarter of cobwebs, like an Eastern bazaar or a medieval marketplace with all the cobblers, all the spice sellers, all the drapers together in the same alley. The biggest measured about a handspan and a...
Monday. A pre-recorded announcement, a few words of welcome in Gaelic then the safety stuff in English, hangs in the air behind the departing ferry. Little else is moving but the clouds, and water slapping on the concrete slipway, and bottle-brown fronds of bladderwrack. There will be another sailing to Mull in an hour or so.
A car arrives, with Monaco numberplates. It stops and the occupants...
A bleary chiel, monger o targes an dirks redds his windae. Neist Holyrood Kirk
a shop chock fu o fudge. Taxis judder on the setts. Naething mixter-
maxter here: some douce sea-maws tak these white-washed wa’s for a new Bass Rock;
a kiltie tour-guide on an open-top bus intones ‘Mary, Queen of Scots …’
to a wheen toorie-hattit tourists, huddlt and snell. The wan sun...
Until we’re restored to ourselves by weaning, the skin jade only where it’s hidden under jewellery, areolae still tinged, – there’s a word for women like us.
It’s suggestive of the lush ditch, or even an ordeal, – as though we’d risen, tied to a ducking-stool, gasping, weed-smeared, proven.
The Black and White Minstrel ShowOut there...
Piled in the corner of a second-hand store in Toronto: of course it’s an immigrant country. Sometimes
all you can take is what you can carry when you run: a photo, some clothes, and the useless dead-weight
of your mother-tongue. One was repaired with electrician’s tape – a trade
was all a man needed. A girl, well, a girl could get married. Indeed each case opened...
The family, stuff of novelists as different as Rose Macaulay and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S....
Poetry anthologies are now expected to make holy war; but what to do with The New Poetry, which strives so earnestly to turn its trumpet-majors into angels? The 55 poets collected here are, it...
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