Category Archives: Poetry

‘The Winter Coast’ by George Gunn

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We don’t usually publish poetry on Bella but occasionally something comes into our hands which we can’t not publish.  The Winter Coast is one such poem.  In this beautiful, timely and epic work Caithness poet George Gunn reflects on a moment, a turning point, where the ground shifts beneath our very feet and everything becomes possible. In our opinion this is a major new work by one of Scotland’s finest poets.  It’s a privilege to be able to publish it first here on Bella.

THE WINTER COAST

(for Kevin Williamson on Burns Night 2012)

 

Six weeks of gales have blown the tide

flat into the bay

a thin white line like shifting ice

separates the sand dunes from the sea

the wind has washed the last green essence

from the January parks

& thoughtful eyes look to the window

to search for blue sky to the West

 

now calm has collared the neck of the storm

& frost has petrified the fields to grey

the bay is full of sea-smoke

& Hoy is iced behind a cloud

hung & busy at forty five degrees

a thin ship of snow & sunlight

tacking East to Cantick Head

 

Hoy is an eyebrow hovering over a dream

the fulmars have returned briefly

each one an Atlantic watercolour

to reclaim the biting air

the nations settlement has changed

since late Summer when they left

it is as if millennia under ice

has forced the sedimentary rock

to bow its flagstone head

but now released from this glacial weight

Caithness rises up to meet the sunlight

& is rising still

free from the oppression of the tilting world

so unlike the determination of Nature

& as unending as her storms

arguments congregate on this Winter coast

like shipwrecked rats on emptied islands

they find house-room easily enough

but will not go

 

today I saw a squad of curlews

beaking their way across a field

where the Two Harolds fought

a rough battle of hacking broadswords

& severed limbs to settle

the blood feud of the Jarl

 

what can I do here

but look for imaginary lives

those in the past I see

rising up from a desk

after a day of labour

opening a door into another room

or ambling across some acres

to view a potato park progressing

beneath a Northern sky

a grey-blue Summer sky

these shades rise & fall

with the sea-clouds off Dunnet Head

my heart leaps

 

the countrys future is shaped by such

as these & many other

formless dreams which find their frame

upon the tongues of those who fish & croft

& refuse to weep

when both coast & Winter

conspire to wash flat

the markers of their lives

 

there are no longer any “fabulous raiders”

save for the Atlantic storms

who sweep their valkyrie of rain

down over Hoy onto our sandstone lap

no longboats other than tankers & trawlers

drive through this bi-polar fjord

Flotta burns its constitution of North Sea gas

these are the leavings of trades weather

 

an otter swims through the edges of the tide

on the sorn for sellags & partans

who works at poems like these

like that anymore

in the pay-as-you-go university

of getting on

& having done so

unlike the otter

are permanently gone

 

Winter peels the skin of Caithness

back to the flagstone bone

on Dunnet sands

the fossil roots of ancient pines

spread out & claw the ebbing tide

like upturned crabs

so close after the two miles deep

pelt of ice retreated

so resin rich & once young

they filled the air with Alpine scent

now they ring millennia

like a swans leg

all this information sinking

into the shell sand

did I swim once otter-like

through these vanished tree-glades?

 

All this life is woven solid

into the slate-shirt of the land

every footprint & handhold

is locked tight

beside the fossil-fish & the dog-wilks

in there is lodged writing

a worm trace across mud

in the bitumen inked paper of flag

captured in an epic of Devonian seabed

 

Time is calm but the age is rough

all is hurry panic rage

difference is made to manufacture fear

so the storm grows confident

& tries on the coat of permanence

likes the fit & feel of it

the palms of my hands grow cold

 

I walk the Winter coast

in search or runes & light

up in the dunes behind me

the marram grass bends back like eyelids

they blink a parabola of three miles

& by the faint light of these flickering runes

I see that nothing is carved

but the sand by the wind

that we are ruled by barbarians

that everything is mocked & denied

to those who cannot forget

by those who cannot remember

 

they say the Aurora will be out tonight

but we will not see it

not because we are not “North of Norway”

but because the Atlantic clouds sit

like the ghosts of ideas on weeping Morven

its late January & the green glimmer

of the Merry Dancers is inside us

beside Robert Burns & the aspirations

of an “independent people”

drilled out like a row of turnips

in a forgotten field

but Januarys book will close

& the Winter coast will thaw its cheek

in the sap-wind of the coming Spring

for the window is still there

& the eyes still look

 

look soon Bride will bring Imbolg

& through the dead month

the wolf-month of Faoilleach

she will wave her white wand

the bellies of ewes will swell

& ravens will build their nests

& the shivering cold will search for itself

skylarks will return to the rising house of their song

but enough

the ground is still hard

from the poverty of thought

no light will shine

or flame burn

without organisation

as there is beneath the sky

& beneath the sea

who will go to the door

& invoke the revolution of desire

who will build such a fire

who will test their finger against the cold

for poverty is cold

who will drink

who will eat

& who will capture youth

& is a nation young

when it is so obviously old

for here is the ground

& here the birch trees grow

& we will drink & eat

enough enough

there is never enough

they tell us

for everyone

I say

there is enough

more than enough

as I look across this land

this sea this sky

this coast where dreams fuse

into purpose & to love

& fly with the fulmars to their home

to build the daylight of the heart

& set our rights out

as being only what we give

& with everything to give

we should give it all

& think nothing think nothing think nothing

of the cost

there is no cost

only love

 

which is our purpose

take the road to light

to the pushing new grass of promise

I heard the fulmar say

as she flew from the Winter coast

 

(c) GEORGE GUNN

Kevin Williamson on our radical seditious patriotic Bard

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It takes a brave or foolish man to try and step into Robert Burns’s Scotland-size shoes but Bella Caledonia’s Kevin Williamson is doing it for fourteen nights in August.  Here he explains why:

I’ve never been comfortable with the concept of Robert Burns, The Shortbread Tin Man; the ubiquitous Scottish commodity, draped in tartan, and toasted once a year with haggis and whisky. This false construct reeks of tourist dollars with a maudlin disregard for historical reality.

Robert Burns was a radical subversive, damn it, who risked his liberty to speak truth to those in power. Plastering his face on couthy tourist tat, in my book, is akin to the Irish dressing James Connolly in a green leprechaun suit and attaching him to key fobs.  It’s insulting, degrading, and just plain wrong. Continue reading →

Not Burns

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By Dougie Strang

Last month the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum was officially opened by the First Minister and by Liz Lochhead, our new Scots Makar.  Earlier, it had opened to the public on the 1st of December 2010. There’s a hard irony in noting that this was the same month that Brownsbank Cottage, near Biggar, closed it’s doors.

Brownsbank is the farm cottage where the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and his wife Valda, lived for 25 years until his death in 1978. MacDiarmid’s two-room home has been preserved as a museum celebrating his life and work. More than that, for nearly 20 years it  has also provided a residency and a stipend for Scottish writers through the Brownsbank Fellowship. A living memorial, which has helped writers such as James Robertson, Linda Cracknell, Aonghas MacNeacail, and Carl MacDougall.

The Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, owned by the National Trust for Scotland, cost £21 million to build; £8.6 million of which came directly from Scottish Government funding. In contrast, for want of around £10,000 a year, funding for the Brownsbank Fellowship has now ended and the cottage itself has been mothballed.

This is how we celebrate MacDiarmid, a poet who, more than any other in the modern era, has contributed to the “ensoulment” of our nation.  A poet who T S Eliot described as writing with “the belief that Scotland still has something to say to the imagination of mankind… and can say only in her native tongue.” A poet who even  the Scotsman defined thus:

For fifty years this man’s hot and angry integrity radiated throughout Scotland… There is very little written, acted, composed, surmised or demanded in Scotland which does not in some strand descend from the new beginning he made. Continue reading →

Notes From The Gutter, Music To My Ears

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Reply

by Kevin Williamson


– And yet I feel this muckle thistle’s staun’in’

Atween me and the mune as pairt o’ a Plan.”


When Hugh MacDiarmid’s whisky-fuelled ‘Drunk Man’ looks up from the gutter, through the dark silhouette of a thistle, to the moon and stars beyond, and contemplates The Warld and Life and Daith, Heaven, Hell, ana’… it is a defining moment in modern Scottish literature.

After the horrors of the First World War, curious Scottish tentacles had pushed onwards and outwards, through the mud and slums, probing and grasping at the bright lights of astronomy, science, philosophy, politics, Russian literature and modernity itself.  The fierce and resourceful intellect of MacDiarmid brought them home to our own Waste Land.

The gutter is a fine place to make sense of such matters.  Twenty years earlier, Oscar Wilde’s most quotable character, Lord Darlington, asserted “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” The field of vision is perfect.

The ground beneath our feet seems to be shifting once more. Over the last few years it’s been wonderful to see the emergence of a diverse group of younger Scottish writers make their mark, loosely converging on the pages of Gutter magazine, many featured in the ground-breaking Cargo anthology The Year of Open Doors (edited by Rodge Glass). Continue reading →

O Donald Trump, Woe Donald Trump

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Donald Trump is an American billionaire born of an exiled Hebridean mother. He plans to build “the world’s greatest golf course” and five hundred executive houses on a pristine beach near Aberdeen, previously viewed as a protected land. This bàrdachd arose from his attempts to evict an elderly woman who stands in his way. It is not an art poem. It is a bardic declamation coming out of a tradition that speaks social truth direct to power – hot, rough, and on the hoof.  
                                                                                                                                                                                                                 – Alastair McIntosh, from The Bunker,[i] December 2010

O Donald Trump
It was my own old mother’s taxi driver
on the Isle of Lewis
who said he lives next
to your old mother’s house
on the Isle of Lewis
That made me think
how close we are
being separated by
just two mothers
and one Stornoway taxi
And got me thinking
of your visit to the Island
back in June 08
to your family croft home
Inside of which you stepped
(according to reports)
for fully ninety-eight seconds
And told the press
(with reference to 
your true relations
which is to say
the Trump International Golf Links)
yes, told the press:
    “I think this land is special.
      I think Scotland is special,
      and I wanted to do something special
      for my mother”[ii]
To which the neighbors said:
       “We never saw the likes of this in our lives
        “He’s had a lifetime to come here so why is he doing it now?”
        “It’s a PR stunt …”[iii]
… because, as a former councillor elaborated
the place was being  “… cynically manipulated”[iv]
and even your own cousin said
with classic Island understatement
(not passed on in your genetic strand):
    “We’re happy to see him
     although the visit
     is very brief.” Continue reading →

The Republic of Hope

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To conclude (but not close) our week long celebration of women writers  - we’re delighted to publish a handful of poems by Lorna Waite, from her forthcoming collection The Steel Garden. We tried to change the space this week and Bella will continue to try and build a wider base of contributors - email us your articles at bellasletters@yahoo.co.uk All week we’ve changed it so that all our posts and all our feeds were from women. Did you notice? Does it matter? We are keen to hear your feedback? What’s good about the poems from Lorna is that this is a change not in just content but in form. Enjoy.

Embody The Republic Of Hope

I embody knowledge of the republic of hope,

A slanty, oblique view of the watercourse of history,

The flow, emerging, receding, bounded,

A constant opening of channels, rivulets of words

Streaming down from the Ayrshire hills

Backing us up, a robust defence

For the south-facing valley of seven furnaces

And the winding of the yarn,

Stories woven into woman’s bodies, memory retreats

Of nets of belonging, nature’s mathematical form

In the furnace hearth, the flowering of firebricks

Petals from Pitcon, Etna, Dalry -

The mountain of Hephaestos wiz here!

Place-map of forged warmth

From the field of the kings,

Birthplace of the first lover,

Witchboy of my fledgling dream,

Safety with the blues face of music,

I remember your dedication

Of the red rose.

 

Classical Blastie ruins, our Parthenon,

Lie crumbled and forlorn under the hammer -

The Ayrshire yarn dyeing company

Dies without respect, the river runs through your shame

We know her power, she is our sound.

The lost objects have been retrieved,

Frontiers of meaning gathered in translation,

Three tongues of history, a section of the body -

Latham understood the heart

The art of she rises from the moist ground,

Flood tide has passed and homes recover,

New measures for protection exist

From your source, atone for neglect -

The flow of the notation of your life

Simple, practical, already known by us.

We are the folk of the Garnock

Hill, glen, burn, wool, steel, water

A valley section, truly ours,

The river pulses, hearts beat to her accompaniment

My veins of water, I drink from wells of memory

The Clyde will make room for your opening

Northeast to south west, a mirror image to other journeys

Ancestral movements, a familiar pattern

Template to embodiment, I ripple with your energy -

All flows southwest, the sacred direction of the Gaels.

Goldenberry Hill shimmers with nuclear light,

The Three Sisters are envisioned from the hilltop.

 

 

The Playing Fields of Class Blame

All bewail the voiced mask of the new puritan -

The broken country awakes to the

New blame on the plasma screen

Of colonial pleasures, my shame is your delight

Platelets for the supply of war

Fodder, fertilised by the decaying bodies

Of the Scottish working class

On poppy fields far from wildflowers

Hackles are raised peacefully

On the myopic red lens of the dreamer.

 

Disarming facts permit old boundaries of sense

On the common weal of memory

Counting dead factories, soldiers,

National debt, guilt mines

Of subsidised belonging -

Pages of the old naming flutter

On a strong breeze, I plant feet

On words detached from playing fields

Without the laugh of women

With furious tongues, lashings of

New sentences for the entitlement

Of decency and voice, classed of course.

 

Full of accented vowels of protest,

Snapping a disobedience with cool sharp

Mouth spilling your rage

Back to you, across the closed gate

Of the motherless places

Where you learn to order the killings.

 

 

The Ayrshire Masque of Learning

In my masque of learning, I am broken-hearted, hopeful Coila

An industrial earthiness hewing lifeblood from soil,

Greener now with tilled care, I will ask the smith god

To make anew industrial objects of a visionary future -

The young steps walking empty dereliction

Of the main street find no civic pride in decaying statue.

Wordless, children were expected to remain so,

Women, banished still from the clubs of the Bard -

Aphrodite would dance within enclosure of fenced erotic

Mind and open the gates for the lassies to enter -

Hear the muse, brothers, of the backgreen,

Your daughters’ mouths and the educated of your ain kind.

 

I am dear -bought Bess, the unfathered daughter,

Early sociologist of chip shop, café, dyework.

A higher education awaited, society rewarded the poor then,

You did not charge me for the opportunity to learn -

People of Scotland, I invest my interest in your soul

Wholeheartedly, no debts to repay -

Harder to embody the communist spirit, west coast politics,

A radical hairline fracture, red and yellow bilious energies,

Tinges of blue scorn, a barren grey-suited,

Past of laboured indifference.

 

Black and yellow team colours worn by the new

Breed a new homeopathic alchemy of words

Free from southern neighbours, hopeful

Compensation for the end of the colonial game

I have gone past the adolescence of history

No more mealy-mouthed compromise of power

With the absent father of the absent fathered.

 

Call time on this dance with devolution -

A staggered reel of dancers spiral north,

Fluid and organic like the tail of a comet.

Did you sabotage us, injure us,

Give us no say, for us just to take it?

Open your eyes to the Oedipal quest.

My soul does not believe your lies, ye see,

At heart who can deny the step dancing of the free -

Covert shadows have less territory to roam

We see the up close nature of monotheistic

Landowning, headshrinking power

It was always going to be so.

 

I am The Star o Rabbie Burns today

Coming home, meeting internal exiles from other regions,

In the inspiring capital of multiple interiors -

The army patrol the frontier of the fairytale,

The military occupation of the birch grove and sacred well

Rests uneasy with the pacifist Blastie, taught by Dick Sneddon

To be the hope of the town. “The future is in you.”

Underground cupboards store weapons, not hope,

Erase a history named only with faint grey lines

Of charcoal, yet secrets still remain.

 

In a firepit of burning maps

I am the place of my first kiss,

The first crossing of a tear-stained threshold,

The door to the wild garden, bronzed in my imagination

A guardian of steel dreams, the water came

And told you her unkempt story

The housekeeping is given to the women workers,

Streets are fashioned with colour, movement trails brush away decay,

All the economic dusting of history cleansed again -

Hard shifts better performed by free people,

The four letter words of human dreaming

So short and easy to say;

Love hope kiss free song bird hill mind

Need more energy to speak

And wrestle with the labour of naming

Cage, lock and fear -

The pregnancy of a republic, a society of free women,

Will be born through the contracting muscles of time

Every woman knows this.

In Memoriam Edwin Morgan (1920-2010)

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By Robert Alan Jamieson

In a life of 90 years, a degree of transformation is to be expected, as times a-change and people must respond. In Edwin Morgan’s, sheer constancy of place, work and passion is remarkable. One city, one job and one great project, he seemed to remain essentially unaltered by the tides that swung around him, the impish mischievous curious boy he must have been still evident right into his final years. But from this fixed fact of his life, there roamed the most flexible and responsive mind, a fiery intellect flickering in the breeze of any new technology or idea to pass nearby.

Glasgow between the wars – still the great Second City of Empire, industrious and mercantile in the extreme, with no great tradition of literature – was not the most obviously nurturing of places for any ‘lissinin boy’, yet he found what he needed there. His early passion for reading led him to persuade his parents to furnish him with access to book clubs and, later, the ivory towers of Gilmorehill provided the perfect environment for its furtherance. Now, the panoramic views from the university buildings on the hilltop, across the Clyde to the southern city, seem to me to conjure Morgan’s personal vision, his deep empathetic understanding of the range of lives playing out there – as if in a flickering slideshow of Marzaroli monochromes.

Scotland during these years was in the grip of the poetic imagination as it has not been for many long decades, with Chris Grieve’s wilful acts of cultural revivification, and personal reinvention as ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ for the public’s consumption. To be a poet, as a social function and not a hobby, must have seemed quite possible to those likely lads – and lasses – growing up then, to Morgan and close contemporaries such as Norman MacCaig (b.1912) W.S. Graham (b.1918), Hamish Henderson (b.1919), George Mackay Brown (b.1921), Ian Hamilton Finlay (b.1925) and Iain Crichton Smith (b.1928). Continue reading →

So now begin

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Open the doors! Light of the day, shine in; light of the mind, shine out!

We have a building which is more than a building.
There is a commerce between inner and outer,
between brightness and shadow, between the world and those who think about the world.

Is it not a mystery? The parts cohere, they come together
like petals of a flower, yet they also send their tongues
outward to feel and taste the teeming earth.
Did you want classic columns and predictable pediments? A
growl of old Gothic grandeur? A blissfully boring box?
Not here, no thanks! No icon, no IKEA, no iceberg, but
curves and caverns, nooks and niches, huddles and
heavens syncopations and surprises. Leave symmetry to
the cemetery.

But bring together slate and stainless steel, black granite
and grey granite, seasoned oak and sycamore, concrete
blond and smooth as silk – the mix is almost alive – it
breathes and beckons – imperial marble it is not!

Come down the Mile, into the heart of the city, past the kirk
of St Giles and the closes and wynds of the noted ghosts of
history who drank their claret and fell down the steep
tenements stairs into the arms of link-boys but who wrote
and talked the starry Enlightenment of their days –
And before them the auld makars who tickled a Scottish king’s
ear with melody and ribaldry and frank advice –
And when you are there, down there, in the midst of things,
not set upon an hill with your nose in the air,
This is where you know your parliament should be
And this is where it is, just here.

What do the people want of the place? They want it to be
filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its
architecture.
A nest of fearties is what they do not want.
A symposium of procrastinators is what they do not want.
A phalanx of forelock-tuggers is what they do not want.
And perhaps above all the droopy mantra of ‘it wizny me’ is
what they do not want.

Dear friends, dear lawgivers, dear parliamentarians, you are
picking up a thread of pride and self-esteem that has been
almost but not quite, oh no not quite, not ever broken or
forgotten.

When you convene you will be reconvening, with a sense of not
wholly the power, not yet wholly the power, but a good
sense of what was once in the honour of your grasp.
All right. Forget, or don’t forget, the past. Trumpets and
robes are fine, but in the present and the future you will
need something more.
What is it? We, the people, cannot tell you yet, but you will know about it when we do tell you.
We give you our consent to govern, don’t pocket it and ride away.
We give you our deepest dearest wish to govern well, don’t say we
have no mandate to be so bold.
We give you this great building, don’t let your work and hope be other than great when you enter and begin.
So now begin. Open the doors and begin.

- Edwin Morgan (written for the Opening of the Scottish Parliament, 9 October 2004)

The Edwin Morgan archive at the Scottish Poetry Library.

Some beautiful readings from Aye Write…including Strawberries, Changing Glasgow (‘whatever happened to the banks?’), One Cigarette, When You Go

See

and from the wonderful Ballads of the Book with Idlewild…’and all the soul grows heavy without the body..’