The Dominant Species fast encroacheth...

Next week is Book Week Scotland!

To celebrate, I'll be giving a reading of new poems at the Shetland Library on Tuesday 27th at 7.30pm (we're doing an open mic too) and taking primary pupils from Dunrossness and Happy Hansel to perform poetry to clients at Overtonlea and Wastview care-centres. Hoping Roald Dahl's 'The Crocodile' is going to feature in there at some point...

Julia Copus' tour of the Poetry Archive

I love the Poetry Archive. I love their attention to detail in compiling a playlist of poems, in the recording process and in writing the poet's biographies that accompany each entry. It is one of the places I am most proud my work appears, and the resource I turn to most often when I'm asked to share something of my poetry and that of the poets I admire. (I think my most-played clip is Edwin Morgan's The Loch Ness Monster's Song, which I play to primary schoolchildren as often as I get the opportunity: it makes them laugh their heads off). So I'm dead chuffed to be represented on Julia Copus' tour of the Archive, which you can join her on here. Thanks Julia!

It's been a busy week...

http://edwinmorganpoetrycompetition.co.uk/

Back home for a few days before returning to Edinburgh to talk about 'Fresh Voices' with Jamie Jauncey, Lawrence Rhodes and Richard Holloway. I'll be speaking about the importance of encouraging creative writing in schools, and presenting the voice of upcoming talent Peter Ratter, who writes poetry and prose in Shetland Dialect and in English.

'My Favourite Place' on Woman's Hour this week

An interview in Shetland by Liz Leonard, with new poetry commissioned by the Scottish Book Trust, aired on Woman's Hour this morning - listen again here - including cameo appearances by some tirricks (arctic terns) and The Nordic Fiddlers' Bloc, whose album I am still loving to pieces. We sat for three hours at the edge of my favourite boulderfield to record this piece...a world of difference from hasty interviews down a telephone line.

A foraged tea...

field mushroom on toast with puffball fried in butter, on a favourite plate...

'Particle – Things Unseen' by Anne Bevan

Anne Bevan turned the Bonhoga Gallery into something like a laboratory for her exhibition 'Particle –Things Unseen'...

with a poem by me on the near right...

from a sequence about forams written for Anne's exhibition and book.

'Ghost' – Anne's 3D model of a Shetland foram