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Dear readers …

Well, here we are again. I’m re-engaging with poetry again after a difficult midwinter. My father died, and even though it was not unexpected, and at the end of a long life, his death has commandeered my time, thoughts and energy. In recent years aphasia meant he struggled to communicate verbally, so it was startling and lovely to hear his voice again in the humanist ceremony, digitised from a cassette tape made 20 years before his initial brain haemorrhage. We shared a love of scrambling over rocks (as per The Geologists’ Daughter), a persistence and a fierce passion for a side gig that runs parallel to a day job that pays the bills (for me poetry, for him, a fascination with the esoteric, proto-science and Mozart’s The Magic Flute) and hidden worlds and a wide-ranging love of music. I’ve written poems about his later years (Intrinsic in Sweet Anaesthetist) and that won’t stop, I suspect.

And the world keeps turning, that’s the brutal fact about bereavement. Here we are, already in February, shoots of new growth poking up everywhere amid the storm damage. And so, and because it’s LGBT+ History Month, I’m busy writing a guest blog for Scottish Pen, due out later in February.

Poetry news…

It’s almost a year since rats nested in my car engine, stashing bird food under stones in every available crevice. Of course I wrote a poem (about which, more here), but it’s fair to say neither I or the rats expected to be in The Rialto ...

In December I led a workshop for the Kith writing community, called “It’s about time.” The aim was to share some of the best poems I’ve read recently on the theme of time. Drawing on poems and other writing that inspired me over the last 18 months, the aim was for people to write a load of raw material, and to fill their notebooks with something to work on later. The 12 participants seemed to find it fruitful. “Wonderful workshop, Jay … got the imagination turning over and over,” “…so much inspiration, thank you so much.” I enjoyed myself so much I’m seriously thinking I might re-run it if there was enough interest. So do drop me an email if you’d be interested in attending an adapted version (via Zoom), maybe in summer / autumn.

From the reading pile … I’ve been enjoying Padraig Regan’s debut collection, Some integrity (Carcanet), particularly a lyric essay on the Pulse nightclub shooting as observed from Belfast through the prism of Glitch City, and some sharp, precise poems on pavlova and pumpkins. I’m also enjoying a substantial hard back volume of the late Canadian poet Don Domanski’s Selected Poems, which is providing me with endless food for thought.

If you’re in Edinburgh or Glasgow and you’re in the market for in-person poetry, do try to catch Helen Boden launching her debut collection with Red Squirrel Press later this month! I was lucky enough to read proof copies of A landscape to figure in. Helen writes about “what the maps can’t show,” exploring her own journey from post-industrial Yorkshire to the outskirts of Edinburgh, knowing “Here at the edge of the firth you can /start to feel the curvature of the earth.”

Me, I’ll be back later in the spring!