It’s a great pleasure to feature four poems from our guest poet Jane McKie. Her collection Carnation Lily Lily Rose was published by Blue Diode earlier this year. The title and title poem are after John Singer Sargent’s painting of the same name. Each word is also the heading of the four sections of the book.

The collection includes a range of poetic forms and shapes: prose poems, a concrete poem, long and thin poems. We meet couplets and triplets, striking titles: Cairn to a Dead Biker, X-Ray of a Deer’s Skull. The poems crackle with energy and vitality. The book is ‘a hymn to all the different kinds of connective tissue that lightly, but firmly, weave us into the fabric of our own and others’ lives’. (David Kinloch).

Lord, Make Me an Instrument

Here the clouds outrun land: greyer, fleeter,
casting their shadows on the estuary and making
mud move at their speed, blown rather than
fixed, flexing with light / dark / light / dark,
sea-blite at the edges to catch the odd discarded
fag butt. Sea pea, clover, yellow vetch.

Further out, the flattened eelgrass – a trammelled
thatch without the tide; with it, upstanding,
like proud speech. Into this landscape creeps
a man following redshank, black-tailed godwits;
watch him huddle – glimmer of a struck match.
Winged souls call to the crackle of his breath.

Sand

Tonight, I’m in an arbour designed
by an artist who moonlights as a gardener.

Our host’s aesthetic sixth sense is spot on:
look how the roses jostle the frame,
how the lattice pins them like pretty moths.
A drink in one’s hand is compulsory.

And we guests are laughing, playing up
a hunger that may be on the wane,
but holds us, tonight, as snug as palms
around glasses. It is brilliant, this garden,
and familiar, as if it is not a garden at all
but a gateway, and we are not guests
at a middle-aged party but school-leavers
on a promised, delicious brink.

Tonight, if you sliced me open,
you would find a swirl of glitter:
all the shades of the sand
at Alum bay squeezed
into one miniature glass lighthouse.

Antigravity

They hover along pavements, barelegged,
on Mini Micro scooters, a flock of them –

the best of us. Hovering in shirtsleeves, hearts
and mouths open before guile sets in.

Don’t they feel the cold? Hovering to class
like motes in light.

On this unbearable, ordinary day, we mothers
can’t stop them lifting off the ground,

their small hands to their mouths
as they giggle, spitting out milk teeth,

growing too quickly. Catch onto
their waistbands and don’t let go.

Harness

I think of the invisible harness that hitches us, one to the other,
how it signifies both baggage and provision;

how, in the past, I have slipped the harness
and tested freedom, finding it overrated;

how mood is a harness, like gravity, pitching our orbits
a little off-kilter;

how sometimes the harness pinches and we are inclined
to worry it, fidgeting, even to tear at it;

how we trust the harness to repair itself like skin.

Biography

Jane McKie works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her first collection, Morocco Rococo (Cinnamon Press) was awarded the 2008 Sundial/Scottish Arts Council prize for best first book of 2007. Recent collections include Quiet Woman Stay (Cinnamon Press, 2020) and Jawbreaker (2021) which won the Wigtown Poetry Festival’s Alastair Reid’s Pamphlet Prize 2021.

Jane, as a member of the Edinburgh-based Shore Poets, facilitates poetry readings and music. She is interested in collaboration across forms, writes with 12, a collective of women writers, and with Edinburgh’s genre spoken word group Writers’ Bloc.