Monday, April 30, 2007

The Bimbo has Landed:Press Release




STRANGE BAMBOO


Hugh McMillan’s fourth full collection ‘Strange Bamboo’ is about to be released by Shoestring Press. This book reveals him as one of Scotland’s sharpest and most accessible talents. His subject matter ranges from the local to the universal but all is observed with clarity, an unsentimental compassion and, often, a rollicking sense of fun.
Much modern poetry is portentous and self-consciously clever. McMillan’s is, as Robert Nye once pointed out, “ a breath of fresh air.”

“McMillan is unique in the angle and tone of his attack on the familiar.” Ian Duhig



Out of the Way



Lydia has pink sandals
and butterfly clips:
it’s sunny in the gardens,
the grass tiger stripes,

the news only a distant wheeze
from a kitchen radio,
drowned by bees,
a breeze, the birdsong.

This is why we’re here:
nothing to worry over
but tumbles on soft lawns,
that and the vicious roar

of fighter bombers, spinning
like needles over garden sheds,
practising pitching bombs
on babies’ heads.



Strange Bamboo ISBN-13 978 1 904886 51 8 £8.95 from Shoestring Press

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Bitter Wee Poems exact some small Revenge on the Poet on the Occasion of His Silver Jubilee

When the light goes off
the blank page you left
sparkles in streetlight
like snow. It's perfect
but you'll be back

to spoil it. At night
we think about what might
have been, if that line
had been just right,
that rhythm less flat,

if you were any good, in fact.
We were battered out and sent
half made into the world,
now we hang about the shelves
all day, your dead-end kids.

Here's a clear image
at last, to define a quarter
century's struggle:
tyro, middle aged,
distils boredom into dross
with a shovel.