Who killed cock robin?

The weekend supplement

says taxidermy’s back, and this time
it is Art. Small birds are flayed, salted
and, with innards felted, posed prone, atop
a copy of the Bible, and placed beneath

a bell jar. Roadkill supplies the specimens.
And the artist notes that the blackbird
is especially thin-skinned. I used to know
a woman who owned a Victorian display
of a thousand butterflies, all pinioned
to depict the family coat of arms.

But who judges a book by its cover?
And who ever thought that honour
might be nailed?

Nordic Poets

I've started to get interested in Scandinavian poetry. I think I've mentioned before that I have Danish and Swedish blood in me from both lines of my family.

Sadly neither language was passed on to me. My father was half Danish on his mother's side, with a Swedish grandmother, but my grandmother died when he was eleven, in the middle of WWII, and contact was lost with her family and my father simply gave up on both languages.

My mother had Danish blood on her mother's side too, but was raised by her father's maiden aunt, after a short-lived marriage between her much older father and very young mother, so again there was no handing on of the language. Indeed I only confirmed her Danish connection by tracing my mother's maternal line after her death, as it wasn't a topic that our family ever discussed.

But I thought it would be interesting to read some Danish poetry, even if it is just in translation, as I often think my tastes and sensibilities are not really all that Scottish.

And from the little bits of research that I've done I've decided that there couldn't be a better place to start than with Inger Christensen.

Here are two extracts of her work:

1) The Butterfly Valley, a series of 15 sonnets, with the final sonnet being made up of lines from the first fourteen and

2) a photograph of a section of The Alphabet on a wall in Copenhagen with an extract of the poem. "Christensen wrote this masterpiece 1981. She uses the alphabet (from a [“apricots”] to n [“nights”]) along with the Fibonacci mathematical sequence in which the next number is the sum of the two previous ones (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…).

As Christensen has explained: “The numerical ratios exist in nature: the way a leek wraps around itself from the inside, and the head of a snowflower, are both based on this series.” Her system ends on the n, suggesting many possible meanings including “n’s” significance as any whole number."

I have just ordered The Alphabet in English and hope to obtain a copy in Danish too, so that I can look at both together.

But maybe I should just stick with this gem, The Danish Poet (winner of the 2007 OSCAR® for best short subject).

Sunday 5 July

We got to land on the Bass Rock on Friday and it was wonderful to be so close to thousands of gannets and to be able to observe their behaviour. Although the pong, the poo and being dive-bombed by herring gulls wasn't all that pleasant........

Here is a shot of incoming gannets. The boat skipper chummed the water with fish as we approached the rock, and soon the sky was full of birds. My camera does not buffer well in RAW format at speed, so this was taken in JPEG.




I'm looking forward to hosting Rob MacKenzie The Opposite of Cabbage tour later in the month. I've been following his travels when I can and hope I can do justice to the earlier stop offs.

In fact there is so much to look forward to this summer, the Scottish Poetry Library's School of Poets Courtyard Readings, as our contribution the Edinburgh Festival; The Beechgrove Garden TV programme coming to help me with a project in my own garden; and our 30th wedding anniversary - which I feel deserves a telegram from the Queen at the very least! Getting to 100 years old is a scoosh these days, but staying married for 30 years is bloody hard work!

Bi-Product

I've decided that life is too short in the summer for long posts so I'll skip through with diary -type entries for the next wee while:

A lovely bi-product of co-editing qarrtsiluni's economy edition has been receiving Pam Hart's book of poems in the post. The Fifth Voice by toadlily press includes Pam's chapbook The End of the Body, and this beautifully observed title poem would be worth the purchase alone. She has the gift of freeze framing tiny time slices and crafting them into good strong poems.

And the beauty of toadlily's quartet series is that you get the work of three other poets too!

Friday I go out to the Bass Rock with Laurie Campbell the wildlife photographer, as part of my prize for winning the Environmental Impact part of a competition back in January. The forecast isn't great, so here's hoping...........

Last night I saw Harvey's Last Chance, with Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, both largely playing themselves. It is a sweet escapist film, in the style of Four Wedding etc. But Thompson does have one good line about the British losing their stiff upper lip since Princess Di. I'm I alone in wishing we could find a bit of it again? Or is the genie too far out of the bottle?

Still editing Harris pictures, this is of Callanish in Lewis. The name makes me want to rewrite the Queen song ........

Home

Ooof, that didn’t last long. We got home late on Sunday night and I have been slowly adjusting to the world again.

Harris was wonderful, the beaches, the dunes and the vast skies cut you right down to size, ‘til you feel like ant in summer grass.

I took lots of photos that I’m still working through, though I’ll probably only keep a few as I seem to get pickier and pickier about what works. But there’s one of water plants floating on a lochan that I’m really pleased with.

And I managed to see a red throated diver, a rare bird of the far north, and that was a real thrill, as they are so beautiful.

The late Ken Smith’s selected poems The Poet Reclining, which I borrowed from the Scottish Poetry Library, came with me and his poems seemed to fit the wildness that I was experiencing. I liked many of them – The Stone Poems, In Transit and Fox in October in particular. He was a fantastic poet and I’m really glad to have had the chance to read more of his work.

Here’s a clip of him that I found on youtube

Big Rock Candy Mountain

Well as Titus Oates said I may be gone for some time......... Dog is off to stay with N., son has been warned about parties and leaving the iron on, water butts are full so that a sensible neighbour can take care on my greenhouse and cameras, bikes, boots and bottles will shortly be loaded into the car.

This song always reminds me of hellish family car journeys, when my sister would run out of distractions and start her nipping games and trips north felt about as momentous and impossible as Hannibal setting out from Carthage for Rome.

I learned today that the real version had an absolutely filthy last verse. Wish I had known that way back when.

TTFN........

Mungbeing slot

A couple of years ago N asked me to take some photographs of her. She is a great advocate of just accepting her new body shape, post mastectomy. She even goes topless back home on the beaches in Spain, and is completely at one with herself.

Anyway, I took a whole series of shots of her and at the end of the session she persuaded me to use the remote shutter release and step into the shot.

The photograph that we captured is featured in this month's Mungbeing with a poem that I wrote about the experience.

She loves this image and I love and admire her for the strength and character she shows everyday living with Stage 4 breast cancer.