Two months: Sorry folks, if any folks are still out there! Too much work, and too much reliance on Facebook. Nearly Christmas, and it has been a long and weary few months. Hoping to give up my work before too long. 34 years last October since I started. I'm still writing like stink and a few things are happening. I'm on Poetry Please on Radio 4 on 22nd December and I am, most excitingly, writing a libretto for an opera due to be performed in Edinburgh in August. Jekyll and Hyde, I'm both!
Was up north last weekend, lovely. Here's a photo and a recent poem.
In the language of this remote area there are many terms for
the feeling
you
get when you see a grey mist
creeping down a cold hill where some wet sheep are waiting stoically
Drod (n) Dull indefinable feeling of being involved in a
scene that prefigures one’s own death, as in ‘This morning my father woke to a
peculiar sense of Drod’
Sleugh (n) Psychosomatic, but terrifyingly real, sense of
nausea, often experienced in natural surroundings
Drod an sleugh
Fister (verb) To creep sickeningly slowly, like an injured
beast, or a disease, as in ‘Uncle Ansel is fistering down the road again’
Fistering drod
Fistering drod an sleugh
Shommers (n) plural (colloquial) a group of things that
might be imagined but are very real to the person that experiences them
Shommers o drod
Shommers o drod an fistering sleugh
Dwank (adj) (archaic) Black, sodden, wet, often in relation
to a carcass, as in ‘Last night I found a dwank horse’s head under the duvet’.
Dwank shommers o drod
Dwank an fistering shommers o drod
Dwank shommers o fistering drod
Crombled (adj) Crippled, hunched, incapacitated as if by
great age or boredom
Crombled wi drod
Flack (verb) To become too weak to move while simultaneously
exasperated
Flacking crombled
Flacking crombled wi drod
Flacking crombled wi shommers o drod an fistering sleugh
