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I am interested in the problems of social and national identity, the relationship between the human and the environment, the individual and the community, the present and the past. I tend most often to write poetry about nature, language, tradition and myth, weather and landscape.

I Said

Round and glowing,
curved, I said, and glowing,
sharp and sweet and bitter and hot,
and gold as guineas and sunlight,
and burning, I said, globed and burning
and piercing, pungent, all those words,
and sweet, and fresh, and dripping,
look, and taste, and smell.
All the words I said.
I meant oranges.

This poem was published in NorthwordsNow in 2007.

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Walking on Water

The trick is to keep moving,
face forward, never look down.
The jelly swell beneath your feet
melts under your gaze, and small fish
silver against the glittering sand
flit from your sudden gravity.

The trick is not to look inwards;
Don’t watch yourself doing it.
It’s important to look away
to where stone houses on the cliff
draw closer, and the white waves
play chap and run on the sand’s door.

The trick is to put your faith
in willing hands stretched out to you,
in those others who take for granted
the paradox and adventure
of walking unsupported
solid on the crest of the sea.

This poem has appeared several times, most recently in One Leaf, One Link (2008), the anthology of the One leaf, One Link project organised by the Perth and Kinross branch of Plus, a Scotland-based group led by people who have used mental health services.

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Orpheus Plays 2: Callander Poetry Festival 2006

For Iyad Hayatleh, a Palestinian poet, finally granted political
asylum in December 2006

Poetry in the Garden starts
when Colin strikes the small Tibetan bowl.
The warmed and singing bronze awakes
A humming clarity, which sounds
through noise of knife and fork, book sales,
poets checking one another out,
and gathers stillness from the rainy night.
Later, Gaelic, Arabic and Greek
will take the song from tongue to tongue
goltraighe, geantraighe, suantraighe. It seems
presumptuous to claim
that poetry has power to move
much in the grinding moneyed world,
but Iyad, remember Orpheus
playing before the Faerie King,
on bagpipes, lyre or Breton harp,
the notes of sorrow, notes of joy and notes
of peace, while Hell falls silent.
All the cruel and unusual pain
stops for one moment, the lifeless courts
and derelict halls resounding
with the music, with the chance
for respite, wisdom, hope.

The Gaelic terms describe the three traditional modes of music.
Goltraighe = 'the weeping strain'
geantriaghe = 'the laughing strain'
suantraighe = 'the sleeping strain'

This poem is one of the Eurydice Rising sequence, published in Poetry Scotland in 2008. It deals with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as it appears in the traditions of Greece, Brittany and Shetland. I have also written a long accompanying essay about how the story was treated and developed as it was transmitted across Europe

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