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  • Pass the Lukewarm Forest
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Pass the Lukewarm Forest

Colin Herd

sheer
anti-establishment
trees

I witnessed the one cut down
the gap
in the grainy curtains

if it can only be this warm
make it colder and less shady
park benchmarks of experience

I think I radiate
because I used to live elsewhere


Colin Herd

from Click + Collect (Boiler House Press: 2017).
Reproduced with the permission of the author.

Tags:

Best Scottish Poems 2017 English trees

About this poem

This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2017. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2017 was Roddy Woomble.

Author’s note:

Somewhere I got hooked on the almost-word “anti-“, and started overusing it. Writing things like “I’m so anti-it I can’t put it into words”. When I wrote this poem I had been reading Clark Coolidge’s mesmerising A Book Beginning What and Ending Away; I was trying to channel its expansiveness and radiation: “why is not always everything of mind a find”. But I was also trying desperately to knuckle down to what Lorine Niedecker in ‘Poets Work’ calls: “condensery”, stripping back. These two got me to thinking about trees, their bark and mutability. And from there, about all these days I spent or imagine I spent as a teenager mooching about with friends and my dog-friend Dayna, in Mine Woods, Bridge of Allan, in a fug of music, books, otherness, etc. I’m going to stop there before I start sounding like I’m auditioning for Call Me By Your Name.

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Best Scottish Poems 2017

edited by Roddy Woomble
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Colin Herdb.1985

A lecturer in Creative Writing at Glasgow University, Colin Herd is also a poet and gallery director.
More about Colin Herd

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