Tag Archives: poetry

The Keelie Hawk – Poems in Scots – by Kathleen Jamie

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The Keelie Hawk, Poems in Scots by Kathleen Jamie was published in 2024. Kathleen Jamie became Scotland’s fourth Makar in 2021 until December 2024.

The Keelie Hawk (Kestrel) is a fairly slim volume, as books of poetry tend to be. The poems are written in Scots, with an English translation on the opposite page. She had planned to just publish a small pamphlet of poems but the poetry editor at Picador Colette Bryce said that she saw no reason why a major London house shouldn’t publish a whole book of poems in Scots, so as Kathleen Jamie said – I scrievit some mair.

I can’t really judge how easy or difficult these poems would be for non Scots speakers to understand, I like to think that by the time you get half-way through then a reader might have picked up the meaning of a lot of the language. I hope so anyway as the Scots is always much more lyrical.

I’m not a huge fan of ‘normal’ poetry but I enjoyed this book. Jamie is much the same age as me so many of her experiences of speaking Scots as a youngster were similar. THEY gave you a row for it, especially at school as it was seen as being slang back then, and of course it isn’t.

This book has 116 pages. All but four of the poems are by Jamie, the other four are in translation which Jamie has adapted into Scots: two by Friedrich Holderin and two by an Uyghur poet Chimengul Awut who hasn’t been seen since she was arrested in 2018 by Chinese security officials and sent to a ‘ re-education camp.’

The Christmas Truce by Carol Ann Duffy

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The Christmas Truce by Carol Ann Duffy is illustrated by David Roberts, and it’s such a cute wee book measuring just 5.5 inches by 5 inches (14 by 13 centimetres).

The Christmas Truce is of course the famous one which took place on Christmas Eve in the trenches in France during World War 1 in 1914. As the time creeps towards midnight the soldiers are all thinking of home and their loved ones

Silver frost on barbed wire, strange tinsel,
sparkled and winked.
A boy from Stroud stared at a star
to meet his mother’s eyesight there.

This book has just 37 pages so it’s a very quick read, but you’ll want to read it over and over again, and the ilustrations by David Roberts are just perfect. I borrowed this from the library just before Christmas but I suspect I’ll end up buying a copy for myself as I can imagine that reading it would become a Christmas ritual for me.

There’s a YouTube video of the poem:-

Carol Ann Duffy was the UK Poet Laureate from 2009 until 2019. She’s a bit of a trailblazer as she was the first female, first Scottish-born and first openly lesbian Poet Laureate.

Carol Ann Duffy’s books have lovely illustrations from different artists with all sorts of styles. I also have a copy of The Gift, illustrated by Rob Ryan. You can see some of his work here.

I also have a beautiful book called The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems which is introduced by Carol Ann Duffy and compiled and illustrated by Jackie Morris. You can see some of the illustrations in that book here.

Adult Fiction by Ian McMillan – a poem

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I’m not a huge fan of poetry but sometimes one just hits the spot as did Adult Fiction by Ian McMillan. It’s in praise of libraries.

Adult Fiction by Ian McMillan

I always loved libraries, the quiet of them,
The smell of the plastic covers and the paper
And the tables and the silence of them,
The silence of them that if you listened wasn’t silence,
It was the murmur of stories held for years on shelves
And the soft clicking of the date stamp,
The soft clickety-clicking of the date stamp.

I used to go down to our little library on a Friday night
In late summer, just as autumn was thinking about
Turning up, and the light outside would be the colour
Of an Everyman cover and the lights in the library
Would be soft as anything, and I’d sit at a table
And flick through a book and fall in love
With the turning of the leaves, the turning of the leaves.

And then at seven o’clock Mrs Dove would say
In a voice that wasn’t too loud so it wouldn’t
Disturb the books “Seven o’clock please …”
And as I was the only one in the library’s late summer rooms
I would be the only one to stand up and close my book
And put it back on the shelf with a sound like a kiss,
Back on the shelf with a sound like a kiss.

And I’d go out of the library and Mrs Dove would stand
For a moment silhouetted by the Adult Fiction,
And then she would turn the light off and lock the door
And go to her little car and drive off into the night
That was slowly turning the colour of ink and I would stand
For two minutes and then I’d walk over to the dark library
And just stand in front of the dark library.

This is the first in a new series from the Guardian. The poet Carol Ann Duffy will be choosing poems from her her own library and sharing them with Guardian readers. Poems to get us through.

I also loved my local library when I was growing up and I was lucky enough to end up working in it, thankfully that one is still open, well it is the main county library, but it makes me feel really sad when I think of how many libraries have closed over the last ten years or so, meaning that so many children in particular are not going to have that library experience. It’s such a false economy.

Ian McMillan is obviously passionate about reading and literacy, you can hear him speaking about the subject in the You Tube video below.

Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

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If the Armistice Day commemorations and the documentaries about The Great War have given you an appetite for more, then you might be interested in this book.

It is a fictionalised autobiography of the war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s experiences in the trenches during 1916 and 1917. The main character George Sherston is Sassoon himself and the action starts at the Army School and goes on to describe the characters and actions along the way.

Sassoon became disillussioned with the war and he ended up being sent to Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, mainly because the poet Robert Graves (David Cromlach in the book) had managed to convince the authorities that Sassoon had shell shock.

It’s a great read if you are into the First World War. However, I was always aware that if Sassoon hadn’t been born into a very wealthy family with influential connections, he would have been put up against a post and shot.

For more information go to the online Sassoon manuscripts which I reached via this Guardian article.