The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion - by
an extract
/
/ i. in which the cartographer explains himself
/
/ You might say
/ my job is not
/ to lose myself exactly
/ but to…
Best Scottish Poems 2014
The Scotswoman who married into the Home Counties - by
Like tweed like pearls
/ like fire like wood
/ like loss like Listen with Mother with me
/
/ Like prayer like water
/ like a Scots laird’s…
Night Fishing - by
i.m. Les Powici
/
/ Britten’s Pond, a July dusk
/ mayflies hazing the flat, brown water
/ as the day’s last rooks flowed into the trees
/ and…
Magritte Macphail - by
It is a union that suggests the essential mystery of the world.
/ Art for me is not an end in…
Slugs - by
Div slugs ken thay ar universally reviled?
/ div thair mithers warn thaim,
/ kep awa frae the beer
/ an that it’s nae trui fit…
The Poetry Reaper - by
sitting in The Scotia
/ after John McGarrigle who-
/ was-killed-in-The Clutha’s funeral,
/ wolfing
/ triangular tuna sandwiches
/ and listening to someone singing
/ We Shall Overcome
/ into a feedback microphone,…
The Lapland Woman and the Finland Woman - by
They’re peripheral to the story
/ grotesque beside the beautiful Prince and Princess
/ or the Snow Queen in her white sleigh
/
/ and even the…
On being asked to write a poem about a tool or utensil - by
I want an item without associations,
/ something clean of history, so
/ it can’t be the dust-pan, at least fifty
/ years old and tattooed…
Locust and Marlin - by
In my father’s old bait and tackle shop
/ giant fish dangle from hooks near the men
/ grinning from ear to…
Silences - by
‘…that which is absent from maps is as much a proper field
/ for enquiry as that which is present’
/ J. B.
Age of fire - by
Don’t let it bring you down.
/ It’s not the smoke
/ from funeral pyres,
/ not crematorium deposit
/ on childhood games,
/ not…
Cold Caller - by
Nearly all the names and numbers
/ in her leatherette phone book
/ are crossed or scribbled out.
/
/ One of these days I’ll dial
/ a dead…