< Notes for Lighting a Fire >
> Publications
> Photography
> Prose
> Workshops
> Biography
> Harmonica
> News
Some Background
Notes for Lighting a Fire, if you discount my book of prose poems about wild birds, Aves, from 2007, is my first book of poetry since Madame Fi Fi's Farewell in 2003. It is a 64 page hardback in a slightly larger format known as American Royal.
The book is divided into three sections. Its centrepiece is the middle section's opening poem, 'Light Up Lanarkshire', a triptych about the physicality of coal and its origins as light, about my grandfather who was a miner for 40 years, and about family, and therefore everyone's, history. 'Light Up Lanarkshire' connects with the book's first, and title, poem; at the latter's close, having lit the coals the poet narrator 'can settle / to the scratch of a pen in praise of primordial fire / with its lapping sound, as earth in its tilt turning round / swings Orion up sparking like a spaceship / of light from behind the black burial mound of that hill.' The rest of the book's middle section continues the family theme via a sequence of poems about my late father.
The book's opening poems, following 'Notes for Lighting a Fire', have a frosty and snowy air; there is also a group of five poems about birdsnesting when a young teenager. Forbidden now, egg collecting in my childhood in the early seventies was still something boys just did. I would contend it remains a big part of the unwritten psyche of maleness in Britain during that period. My poems treat it as such. Awestruck, guilt-heavy, they are potentially about a big difference between maleness and femaleness. I call it, with all due deference to Freud, 'egg envy.'
Birds fly in and out of some of the poems in the third section; frogs on the Petit Camargue skyline make 'a constant stadium roar / horizon-wide at the foot of the sky' in another poem; 'Light Leaves (2)' is a two section praise poem in which 'The leaf in its little inn is more / radical than the greatest prophet'. 'Find', printed here on the right below, is 'about', I suppose, the desire for precision and pattern out of chaos. There are more people-centred poems, too: a narrator goes back to a spit 'n' sawdust pub he drank in long ago, and finds it dramatically changed; a man encounters a friend, a wry old Scots countryman, in an Ayrshire shopping mall. The collection closes with a memory of horizon light illumining a room at dusk, in a poem evoking those moments when one's consciousness is touched and unsettled by the presence of something much bigger than the self. In a sense, the collection's end links to its beginning: fire in the hearth to world's edge fire.
Read two online reviews of the book:
Buy the book from HappenStance Press's website.
The front cover
A sample page