poetry
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I was fortunate enough to get a ticket to hear Seamus Heaney read at the Book Festival yesterday. Given that the tickets had sold out within hours of being released to us mere mortals, I had surrendered all hope of hearing him until a colleague of mine suggested that there might be returns. So I…
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My first trip to this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival yesterday. I had tickets for three events, but could only make it to two of them. I couldn’t make it to the poetry translation workshop with George Szirtes, which was the event I had really wanted to attend, but I managed to pass my ticket…
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Several weeks ago, I finally managed to visit Little Sparta, the late Ian Hamilton Finlay‘s garden. Finlay was a man of unique vision and creativity. With his collaborators, he transformed the bare land of Stoneypath farm into a poet-artist’s garden, in which everything–the land, the buildings, the plants, the installations–is shaped according to a coherent…
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I have just this afternoon discovered that Alasdair Gray has a website. As anyone who knows Gray’s books would expect, it is illustrated in his distinctive style. It also contains poetry, plays, interviews, biliographies and a fragment of a storyboard for an “intended screenplay” of Gray’s most famous novel, Lanark. Gray also has a blogspot.…
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Does anybody know of, or have any good ideas for, a noun for a gathering of monostiches? “Sequence” seems somewhat overblown. My only thought so far is a “seam” …
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I arrived home on Friday to a most pleasant, unexpected piece of post: a pamphlet containing poems from the 2005 Amnesty International poetry competition, with my winning poem in pole position. With a nice sense of cheek and irony, the pamphlet is entitled “Extraordinary Renditions”. You can purchase it from Anthea West, the secretary of…
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Tuesday night saw the launch of There are words, the collected poems of Gael Turnbull, who died in 2004. Gael was a doctor, morris dancer, Liberal Democrat activist and endlessly inventive poet, though I knew of only the first and last of those aspects to his life while he was with us. Gael’s publishing life…
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Reading this review, I was struck by the American reviewer’s incomprehension of “the dichotomy … of accessibility vs difficulty” (an incomprehension I share to a great extent, as you might know if you’ve read my post on Geoffrey Hill). I was set to wondering what it is that makes this tribalism so British. It’s not…
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Listen to this before it vanishes from the internet next week.
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Monday 22nd May, at The Village, 8 – 11pm, £3: Foakies present: TRAVELLING WAVERLIES. The Waverlies line-up will feature Bob Shields, Mike Dillon, Tom Fairnie, Mark Barnett, Nancy Somerville and Jane Fairnie. Shore Poet ANDREW PHILIP Dutch singer songwriter BERNARD BROGUE, a superb songwriter and guitarist who will play an extended spot on what will…
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Heavens, Edinburgh is home to more festivals that you can shake a wad of tickets at! This one was brought to my attention by fellow Shore poet Nancy Somerville. I might be reading on the Monday night in the–ahem–Foakie Doakies event, but that’s still to be confirmed. That’s this Monday coming, by the way.
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I’ve been dipping in and out of Geoffrey Hill‘s new book, Without Title, lately. It’s not his most immediately captivating work, but there are flashes of the Hill brilliance here and there throughout. Hill is one of those poets considered difficult. I’m not about to deny that his work is dense and challenging, but I…
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Roddy Lumsden has reviewed HappenStance and its publications for his blog on the Books from Scotland site. This is what he has to say about Tonguefire: My favourite of the bunch is Andrew Philip’s Tonguefire, a selection of careful, image-heavy lyric pieces dealing with the domestic and the numinous. I first encountered Philip, who now…
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A Rough Guide to Monday MorningBee PurpleFor Broken or Worse (sequence)Hairst Day (Scots translation of Rilke’s “Herbsttag”)Man With a Dove on His HeadThe Image of Gold and the Fiery FurnaceWaiting for the Rains to Come
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Here is Anna Crowe’s review of Tonguefire in issue 2 of Sphinx (the “Common Reader” comment is a feature of the magazine): What strikes the reader at once, reading Andrew Philip’s collection Tonguefire (with stylishly emblematic cover), is the sheer energy and power of these poems. The writing is muscular, urgent and assured, offering a…
Amy Jo Philip 