Programme for Readings at the Cornerstone Bookshop August 2012

We are delighted to announce that the programme of readings for August 2012 is now complete. We have a great lineup for this year and we look forward to welcoming readers and audience to our new venue, the Cornerstone Bookshop, just below St John's Church, Edinburgh. (text below is the same as in the flyer, only in larger print)

THE GOLDEN THREAD OF POETRY August 2012

in the Cornerstone Bookshop (independent, inclusive, ecumenical, charitable)

St John’s Terrace, Princes Street Edinburgh, EH2 4BJ

0131 229 3776 edinburgh@cornerstonebooks.org.uk

www.cornerstonebooks.org.uk

All events from 5.30 – 6.30 pm : with songs from Toby Mottershead on the terrace afterwards

Tuesday 7^th August

A C Clarke : compassionate poems about anatomy and atheism

Lesley Harrison: poems of birds and landscapes, minimal, exact

Anne Murray: well-made poems, well-read, well-travelled, well-thought

Wednesday 8^th August

Rosie Alexander: personal discovery and local feeling, a young poet from Orkney

Morgan Downie: also an artist, his poems draw from life and landscape

James Robertson: poems in Scots on political, historical, mythical and environmental themes

Thursday 9^th August

Tom Hubbard: international poems in English and Scots, lyrical or satirical

Nalini Paul: deeply thoughtful poems inspired by nature and experience

Morelle Smith : an exploratory traveller, she addresses the inner and outer journey

Tuesday 14^th August

Chrys Salt: ‘seriously good, thoroughly individual’, reading from her new collection

Pauline Prior Pitt: alternately funny and poignant, the older woman, island life

Wednesday 15^th August

Patricia Ace: poems of family, relationships and nature

Dawn Wood: a scientific mind brings simple subjects, wonderful connections

Thursday 16^th August

Lesley Duncan: her poems range from history to the contemporary, with acute observations

Hugh Macmillan: well-made well-delivered Scots historical comment, erudition and wit

Tuesday 21^st August

Jila Peacock: translations of Hafiz and Rumi read in Persian and English

Tessa Ransford: her new book is ‘don’t mention this to anyone’

Wednesday 22^nd August

Alexander Hutchison: philosophical, witty, aware and finely-written poems

Jim Aitken: angry at injustice yet tender and humane, poems of possibility

Thursday 23^rd August

Tessa Ransford and Iyad Hayatleh: A rug of a thousand colours: poems and translations inspired by the five pillars of Islam, bilingual in Arabic and English.

Water, Another Jetty

The boat is like a scooped out wooden shell

a crab once lived in.

It follows an oblique path to the shore.

A thin rope ties it to the wooden jetty.

The sun shines, out of reach of clouds.

The beach is pebbles, grey and rounded,

warm to the touch.

The sun has the whole estuary to itself,

fingers water, turns stones inside out,

revealing their true colours

Words and images - Morelle Smith

Two Poems

FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN

I had not expected this at my age:

all the muscles tightening in my throat,

my eyes welling up and glazing over

and palpitations in my ageing heart.

But more than this. I could wander around

the house, the streets outside and suddenly

your image would appear and then your voice

and I would engage in conversation -

Internally, of course, though it felt real.

I could hear you clearly, see you clearly

with that mischievous look from piercing eyes

and I would hold you close in an embrace.

I had not expected this at my age

and thought of the gap in years between us.

These things don’t seem to matter nowadays

and with this trend I felt myself at ease.

But deep down I knew it would never last,

your eyes were bound to rest on someone else

but what had been was bound to stay between

this grandad and his two year old grandson.

Jim Aitken

 

THE WHITE STICK

Like a blind man with his white stick

faltering sometimes on pavements,

only familiarity

and persistence can lead him on.

For ourselves when the fog descends,

when we can’t seem to find our way,

the white stick of inspiration

can become a shaft of lightning

That transforms the darkness for us,

the white flash a wand in our hand

that gives us lasting expression;

the bright new dawn of our learning.

Jim Aitken

Two Watery Quintas - River, Sea and Rain

The broken jetty

and the clouds over the water -

swag bags of rain slung

over shoulders, slate grey clouds

that don’t look back.

 

The ripples on the water

have a slick look to them

the reflection of the high bridge -

where the trains still pass -

near-perfect

Poems and images - Morelle Smith

Concealed by Blossom

March 26^th 2012

The dark days are done as we turn towards light

white on black like swans on water and the jaunty pied wagtail appears in black and white

with the first daisies in flower in the long grass wet with haar while the kestrel hovers above

a single dandelion and a cloud of almond blossom conceals the singing robin

Tessa Ransford

photo by Kurien Koshy Yohannan

First Flowers in Woods and Gardens

Garden snowdrops - posted by Freda Stobo.

EMBROGLIO

This body a carapace

shell for molluscs of thought

a pack of gregarious senses

of inaudible resonances

happy loving hurt

As we join the circus of life

intelligent cells coalesce

encounter the earth minutely

while part of the planet completely

survival the quiet test

Plants, such givers of life

seeds, a prism of colours,

sharers and makers of water

of feelers, of roots, of rapture

and soundless orators

To wait is the hardest demand

on the human unsatisfied mind

on the human impatient heart

whose senses are truly refined

when dark, deaf, silent and blind

Tessa Ransford

Wild snowdrops posted by Morelle Smith

That Season Just Before Spring

This morning it's misty, the crows caw and a chaffinch was piping, the snow shrinks and a dull green, a thin, light-starved, emaciated mat, greenish brown, is revealed. The snow, frozen to clumps of grey ice, forms slippery hillocks, wet, half melted, treacherous as the speeding mind, desperate as a weapon, to be off.

I am not going to follow this fire or this blade, I am tempering, slowing, I will shoulder an axe, I will lean on a saw, into the patterns of wood, cut a floury path through the branches, smell the resin, listen to the crunch of my boots on the faltering ice. I will gather sticks, my armour against time and the drying of laundry and hopes, remembering smells of dried pine, and warm cotton, the first flowers ripe as coconuts, yellow as corn.

The birds throw themselves from one tree to another, piping and growling and tripping over the twigs and the garden table, the tree-trunks and the matting and drooping of last summer's flowers.

Sap is pushing its way through the trees and buds are already glowing with colour.

…

The light has stayed so long, and changed everything. The earth scent, the sun going down at a different point in the sky. So the light makes quite different patterns of shade – shadows appear in unexpected places. Sunlight too, carries a rush bag in its arms, and empties it all over the garden, among the fir twigs and larch bark the colour of rust, and thick, like lumps of papier maché.

Morelle Smith