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My first published collection, 'Two Clocks Ticking', won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award for 1997. Here are a couple of my favourite poems from it.
My first published collection, 'Two Clocks Ticking', won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award for 1997. Here are a couple of my favourite poems from it.
My daughter used to bring me gifts
and cards she'd made herself:
everything in primary colours
or black and white
for the father who must have
mystified her;
loving enough but distant,
wrapped up in his reading
or lost in his thoughts.
I still have them -
a simple, smooth pebble from a beach
with a drawing of a bird
to be used as a paperweight;
or a gaily crayoned envelope of card
to keep a record in - that sort of thing,
direct and uncomplicated
from her world to mine.
Nowadays, her world is mine.
She buys her cards; she buys her gifts.
She's growing up and so prefers
not to risk her heart on a sleeve
nor her love on a stone.
I have to call her twice
when she's lost in a book.
And there are more greys in the world
than there used to be.
SELECTIONS FROM THE BLACKBURN SUMMER CATALOGUE
Joseph rattles the hotel doors open; 11 a.m.
His meek eyes sink in a bright spear of sun.
The May morning is freshly stamped,
its blue and gold still slightly damp.
The wind is like a censer swung.
Facing the Crown is a bank of flowers,
night-scented stocks, corn mint sweet.
The wind makes a flotation
and squanders the scents
in drunken generosity about the streets.
Blind Pat wanders without a cane.
He knows the village by the corners and curves
of smell and sound.
In the darkness of his sunlit house,
he plays jazz guitar. In Braille,
he reads the strings aloud.
The kids are making their First Communions.
The girls’ white dresses and veils
are blossoms of May, blown through the churchyard.
McGuire down the road is building an extension.
He lofts bricks from the ground to his son
on the roof, hoisting each one
like he tossed an invisible caber.
From the bright air Junior picks
and stacks each soaring brick.
In a room in the house in the lane by the Cross,
a girl is eating a Kiwi fruit.
She delicately decapitates the hedgehog’s egg
before spooning out the sweet green yolk.
And a young blackbird cock,
glossy and sleek,
preens on the wall a foot from the nest,
turning its head from side to side
as if it had tried on several beaks
and liked the yellow one best.
My second collection, 'Smoke & Mirrors', became my 'difficult second album'. Nevertheless, there are some poems in it that I consider among my best. Like...
ALCHEMY
We loved each other like Newton’s Third Law.
You freed me at once from worn old gravities,
walking, that autumn, heels over head,
the pearl grey streets of prissy Edinburgh,
my feet never quite touching the ground –
up, down, strange and charmed –
down the Old Town’s lands and wynds,
up the New Town’s squares and circuses:
Roll up! Roll up! Right this way!
Newly arrived in the State of Undress,
our particles accelerated in naked singularity
and ABRACADABRA!
Rockets zoomed and fireworks cracked,
light split into fans of colour;
Edinburgh seesawed like a ride at the shows,
coloured lights and steam organ waltzes,
the prim old town like a dowager in drink,
lurching through the reeling night with her streets up,
painting herself red and spreeing in corners.
A symphony of doorbells rang;
car-horns played a traffic voluntary;
front doors beat out a rhythm like tom-toms
all the way up lamplit streets;
lighted windows flickered like flashguns;
grannies whirled on every lum;
lead grey roofs shone like gold;
a crescent moon swung like a swingboat.
And we slept.
While the world,
birlin’ like a peerie,
twinkled like a star.
