‘The Solway Poets (SP) have worked together for the last ten years and have drawn crowds to performances across Britain’.
‘The kind of poetry that gives poetry a good name.’
 Chrys Salt
Chrys Salt is an award winning writer, poet and theatre director. Her first collection of poetry ‘Inside Out’ (Pub: Autolycus) earned rave reviews and sold out in consequence since when she has published several poetry collections including ‘Daffodils at Christmas’ (The Galloway Poet’s Series) and a recent Poetry Scotland ‘duo’ with Elspeth Brown. Her work has been published in a wide variety of journals, magazines and anthologies as well as being broadcast on Radio 3 and 4. She has performed with everyone from former poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis to George Melly and in venues across the UK and the USA. A new Collection will be published in Spring 2008.
 Donald Adamson
Donald is currently a lecturer at Helsinki University. He is a prize-winning and award winning poet winning First Prize in The Glasgow Herald Millennium Competition and receiving a Scottish Arts Council Bursary in 1996. He has two collections: Clearer Water 1996 and The Gift of Imperfect Lives, 2002. He has translated the works of Lassi Nummi from Finnish into English.
 Elspeth Brown
Elspeth writes poems, plays and short stories for adults and children and is published in various magazines and collections. She is author of three poetry collections - Skifters, The Green Man and a School of Poets pamphlet, Time Steps. Scripts include The Siege of Haddington for a Son et Lumiere and a play about James Clark Maxwell, which has received numerous performances (Edinburgh Festival of Science and Edinburgh Festival). She is a creative writing tutor in Edinburgh and an editor of the anthology, Feet Above The Ground.
 John Hudson
Widely published and award winning poet, fiction writer, editor and screenwriter. Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association travel bursary 1992 and Scottish Arts Council Bursary 1999. Publications include Medusa Muse 1995 (poetry collection), Round About Burns 1996, The Collected Poems of William Nicholson 1997. John's film 'Solway Fire' and literary exhibition 'Spirit of Greatness' was shown at London's Poetry Library, Royal Festival Hall in 2002.
The Solway Poets were jointly awarded a grant from The Scottish Arts Council’s Work Development Fund in 2003 to finance their 45 minute poem, ‘Collateral Damage – a poem for peace for four voices’ about the war in Iraq.
The Solway Poets can be booked for any occasion either individually or as a group on 01557 814196/175 or 020 8969 9221. All are available for Scottish Book Trust funded events.
email:
Watch this space.
The Solway Poets have appeared together or separately in venues nation wide including:-
The Cheltenham Festival
The Edinburgh Festival
The Dumfries and Galloway Festival
The Langholme and Eskdale Festival
The Wigtown Literary Festival
The Ayr Festival
Jester Festival/London
The Tolbooth, Kirkudbright
Café Kudos/Edinburgh
Joppa Rocks Hotel, Edinbugh
Bedford Hotel, Edinburgh
Edinburgh Theatre Workshop
The Bruce Hotel, Kirkudbright
The Lochthorn Library, Dumfries
The Ewart Library, Dumfries
The Botanical Gardens/Glasgow
The Sternberg Centre/London
The New End Theatre, London
The Tower Theatre/Moffat
The Swallow Theatre/ Whithorn
The Torriano Meeting House/London
The Picadilly Poets/London
The Portobello Poets/ Edinburgh
The Cream o’ Galloway’ Rainton
Designs Gallery/Castle Douglas
Lancaster University Concerts
The Scottish Poetry Library/ Edinburgh
Centres Regionale de Letters, Castries, Languedoc France
Opera de Lyon, small concert theatre
Jardins de Rospico, Brittany
Pont-Aven Festival, Finnistere, France
Falls Road Community Centre, Belfast
Edinburgh International Book Festival
Shetland Simmerdim Events
Threave House,
The Cairndale Hotel, Dumfries
The Tricycle Theatre
The Bowery Poetry Club, New York
Whitehouse Gallery
The Bakehouse
Copies of Markings can be obtained from
The Bakehouse, 44 High Street, Gatehouse of Fleet, DG7 2HP
Email: or
Price £6.00 + 60p (p&p)
BY CHRYS SALT:
Daffodils at Christmas
Gay as a blackbird’s beak
your daffodils unbud
and burst into frilled trumpets
this Christmas morning, bringing a torch of freshness
to the season’s ritual,
reminding the heart’s cold bulb
of its green forgotten centre.
Better to have left the corner bare
than focus this bright beam
on the chill comfort I have grown to.
Better not to dare
this incandescent flame
for fear its clear and unexpected shining
blinds me into love,
and, sweeter than sap, your gentleness
enters my bones,
calling my roots to draw up joy again.
Old Dunkets
Cut your capers.
Old Dunkets sip weak tea
dim-eyed in dingy rooms
and are forgotten.
The clocks stopped at half-past three.
Though rotten floor-boards
creak
their somebody expected
never comes.
Dunking biscuits
with turkey claws
is urgent business.
wafer ears await
the rattle of doors
or feet on gravel.
Cut your capers,
come
before their homes
unravel
It landed on my page and I killed it with the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry
A fly,
No bigger than a crumb.
No match for me.
The very worse it could have done
was make me itch.
But then it seemed to me
to make the room unclean
And that is why
it had to die.
Now on my empty page it lies.
Such little deaths epitomise
the cruel and senseless things we do.
I am sorry little fly -
I wasn’t thinking about you!
BY DONALD ADAMSON:
Damaged
There's not a single tree in the wood
that isn't damaged.
Yet they grow tall and old
and when at last they fall they are noticed
not by their malformations
but by their absence, sudden blue
astonishments of sky.
Being is its own achieving.
The fabric of things
mends in spans accomplished and the joy
of particular wounds. Do not ask to be cured
nor pass your parcel of injuries
to others. You were damaged, let yourself
be changed and grow and live.
The Black Dress
"No problems in heaven" sang Piaf
(she had fainted during the show,
in shock at the death of her lover.
Still she carried on, the song
was Hymn to Love).
We think of people becoming angels
and why shouldn't she be one?
Perhaps she is in heaven and on stage,
wearing the black dress
she made herself, the one
that was torn at the back
and had to be fastened
with safety pins –
and still facing forward
so no-one in the audience can see.
Love Not War
(Iraq, March 2003)
We two do not make war; we do make love –
but once made, can love be kept? Can mere flesh,
even doubled, even tightly clasped
construct from that thin shell a shelter
against whatever's dropped
by gods or demons, from a dangerous sky?
We two do not make war, we do make love –
not for eternity, neither for what is over
in a moment. For what then? Rather
as a configuring: limbs and epidermis
forming a shape, a crucifix, a sign
like the one used by peasants, goggle-eyed,
in vampire films.
We two do not make war, we do make love.
So, as the bombs fall
and the sky glows fiery red
and the electricity fails, and the phones go dead
and the burst water-courses carry a crust
of rot and shit,
let there be love. And let it be
our talisman, our Get-Thee-Hence.
BY ELSPETH BROWN:
Beach People
We are the beach people
catching the sun,
sight sharpened by the light,
our reading glasses unused.
We are the beach people
aware of the surface warmth
on our feet, the damp cool
against the digging heel.
We are the beach people
linked to light rays lingering
over water in uneven light,
an ancestral sea smell calling.
We are the beach people,
sea swell tugging us in, lips salty,
legs caressed by tawny weed.
We sit beside the purple
ectoplasmic jelly fish, beach people
waiting for the turning tide.
Love Map
I ask only love strong
as the Cuillins,
wide as the Atlantic
high as Ben Nevis;
our love shining brighter
in lonely places
as do the constellations.
I ask only faithfulness
deep as Loch Ness
for lack of trust breeds
monsters.
May our lives have
the camaraderie of Glasgow,
not the feuds of Glencoe,
with the grace of Inverness,
the strength of granite Aberdeen,
be as international as kenspeckle Edinburgh,
varied as the West Highland Way,
and as passionate as the winds of Caithness.
Skifter
"What should a stone be like
to walk and fly on water?"
Flat and thin, worn by the tide
or the loch storms.
There's more a feel
learned from my father
at Sheltigo, it formed
to my hand and his.
How can I show her, the child
his descendent, the wash
of the Dunoon ferry
wetting our feet, the feel
of the skifter in your hand
and the ache of loss
for the hands gone?
The inevitable wash of time
eroding the stones.
"They must be flat,
and worn with age,"
I say, "then launched
carefully to meet the waves."
"But which colour?"
Does it matter? Four years old
She is adamant it does.
"I like the ones like sun
like patchy sun that
comes at bed time
catching the light like
jumping fish
they look alive, are they? Are they?
Are skifters alive?
They're not dead, are they?"
BY JOHN HUDSON:
Poem
I buy two bouquets of roses
One for memory
The other forgetfulness
From Across the River
Was that you walking by the river
Under the lamp in the mist?
And did I call to you
Or was it the curlew crying
Across the night?
And did your eyes look into the moon,
Your green eyes questioning
Who is there?
I am there
Breathing gently the breath of beasts
Asleep; I am in the moon
And I ride upon the curlews call;
I am lamp and sallow mist
Rising from the sea, occupying
Your heartland, the lustre
Of your lustful gaze.
Designer War
Gentlemen and ladies,
So kind of you to come;
We’re here to please the masses,
And this’ll leave you dumb.
A war, of course, is gory,
Legs and arms are lost;
But here’s a different story
That makes a cry, a boast!
At first we need to brand it,
Find some identity;
A slick designer’s mandate
For cold atrocity.
And then we need a strap-line,
Or image – take the sun
Setting on a land-mine
Or spent Iraqi gun.
Next, we make the palette
Harmonise with red,
Capturing the desert heat
To camouflage the dead.
Replace a correspondent’s blurb
With banners stating “Live”;
That word betrays the lying verb:
The fallen will survive!
Website by Alistair Pope IT.
|
