A REMARKABLE project bringing together poets to share their works in this time of crisis is nearing its end.
Poet Hugh McMillan has brought together poets from all over Scotland, as well as a few from abroad, to create Pestilence Poems, a 50-entry blog which shares poems and readings each day, gathered online from his home in Dumfries and Galloway.
With his vast knowledge of poetry and poets, McMillan was able to persuade a top-class field of writers to participate in the project, which has just a few days left to run and has garnered a superb and timely collection of poems for this age of pandemic.
“I was very surprised how keen folk were to record themselves in lockdown,” he told the BBC. “Though there have been many technical challenges, I’m very pleased with the way the project is working.
“I know of very many people who look forward not just to this blog – which I think is unique in its form and scope – but others like it. Poetry is singular in cutting to the chase: saying the things that make people think, feel and empathise.”
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One of the latest poets to join the project is independence supporter Gerda Stevenson, the award-winning actress and writer who featured in Braveheart.
Stevenson has just announced that Quines, her critically acclaimed collection of poems published by Luath Press which had its first edition in 2018 and is now on its second edition, is to be published by Edizioni Ensemble in Rome this year, translated by Laura Maniero, and supported by Publishing Scotland.
Stevenson chose to include How To Tell Him in the project, which is published in full below.
“I thought it was appropriate for these times. At present during the coronavirus pandemic, so often people are being separated from elderly loved ones who are dying without their family being able to be with them. This poem, although referring to different circumstances, is nevertheless about receiving, and communicating, the news of the death of a loved one who is far away”, she told The National.
How To Tell Him
(On receiving news of my mother-in-law’s death)
I replace the phone on its cradle,
the news resting in my ear.
How to bring it to my mouth,
be midwife to words that will cut
the cord of their braided years.
How to tell him?
He looks up from his paper
like a child over a garden hedge –
her fond and only prodigal.
I can hear the clock on her mantelpiece
two hundred miles away, its tick
a pulse to the music of her days:
the hens’ muffled clucking at her kitchen door,
the hot water tank’s bubble and slurp
as the peat-blaze sears the back boiler;
the ferry’s boom at the pier head,
the wind’s whine up the croft brae.
She’s still alive until I tell him,
sending eggs next week, as usual,
swaddling each fragile oval
in the Press & Journal’s folds;
tomorrow’s pot roast is on the stove,
homage to the Sabbath, when
duty-bound, she’ll take her ease;
and she’s skinning Golden Wonders,
scooping salt herring from a plastic pail,
their scaled bellies a rainbow in her palm –
until I tell him.
The poem is published in If This Were Real by Smokestack Books.
The other poems and readings are on pestilencepoems.blogspot.com.
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