Scotland

I've grown up in the Highlands of Scotland. My mother's people came from Wester Ross, one of the wildest parts of the country, with more deer and sheep by far than humans. During the 19th Century many thousands were evicted from their crofts by the landlords, the lairds, and sent to the growing cities or to America or Australia. Most of them never returned. It's often a landscape that foreigners fall in love with: these rugged miles of heather-covered, treeless hills. Yet it's actually a ravaged landscape; it has been transformed by man, and by centuries of bad management. But even to this day you can find the remains of those ruined crofts; the scars and the sadness of the clearances are still all too evident. At the moment, Scotland is in the process of working out what it wants to be; whether it will remain part of the United Kingdom or find the courage to become independent once more. This poem, now part of my volume of selected poems Island, reflects on all the questions we're asking.


The State of Scotland

See this land through a broken window,
all huddled in mist, rocked by storm,
the whole long drudge of winter.

Half its people want to leave;
the other half who want to stay
don't choose, they have no choice.

Our history is written in the hills. We are filled
with pride for what we think we did
and guilt for what we didn't do.

We drift into cities since we cannot stand
the sound of our own thoughts. We spend our lives
being loud, and trying to forget.

Do we want freedom or just the chance
to mourn not having it? We are willing to fight
for all that we don't want.

September

Scotland is entering its twilight months. Like an old ragged bear she is creeping into the darkness to go to sleep. Year on year it's the same: the once familiar places that were filled with children's laughter and the brightness of summer take on new shapes and turn somehow different. All that was known becomes a little stranger. It's still September, and there is length to the evenings, but come early November and the return of the mists, days are sometimes barely lit at all. I love this place, this strange and wonderful land, because it's a perfect cave for the imagination.


ENOUGH

Out of the scurry of the days
A place of late sunlight, and the sky
Swimming into blue unclouded;
The trees held in a bonfire of the last sun.

Enough to wait here by the wood's edge
And let the things still hurrying to be done
Fall silent, as the first stars
Vague the orange of the far-off west.


(From the collection Coracle, published in London by SPCK).

Father

It's Sunday as I write and today, as on many days, I think about my father. Perhaps it's because the day is sombre: Highland Perthshire is quiet - almost as if the birds themselves know it's a Sunday. The leaves are beginning to turn from their summer green and the rowan berries are in bright clutches outside my study window. I have just returned from the mad rush of southern Germany to all this quiet, and it is made more evident in the wake of such constant noise.

I didn't really have a great relationship with my father - not until after he was gone. When I was a young boy we kept missing each other; that's how I like to describe it now. By that I mean that the things we said and wanted to say kept on being misunderstood, misheard. Afterwards I thought it was almost as if we were somehow standing talking and not quite hearing what the other said. And then he was suddenly gone. I had grown up with older parents, and I was blessed to have him so long.

It was only after his death that I began to write poems for him, about him, about us. I never imagined that such poems would come to the pen (and that is the great thing about poems, you can't know truly predict them ahead of time). Perhaps my subconscious was working through some of the things that weren't dealt with on this side. All I know is that they brought comfort, and even understanding. When I think of him now I see him laughing, with a face full of laughter. Not mocking, just happy.

This poem, from my collection 'Coracle', is one of the last of such pieces to be written.


A Kind of Coming Back

Sometimes I imagine the phone ringing in the night -
That worst of all nightmares - and staggering out
Into the darkness of the hall. My small voice
Asking the question - afraid, white, far away -
My father answering, ten years dead, as though
Nothing at all had happened. Asking me how I am
As in the old days, when I came home from university,
When he put down his pen in the study and turned
That half-smile on his face. I'm fine
I whisper now, ghostly, into the nothingness of the night -
Knowing this cannot be, this is impossible.
I'm glad, he says, serious at last, as though he means it,
And puts the phone down, leaving the humming nothing
Of that no man's land between the worlds.

Iona

I try to visit Iona every year and this year I won't make it. Iona is my spiritual home: this tiny island on the edge of the Inner Hebrides of Scotland where the monk Columba arrived with Christianity all these hundreds of years back. It's much bigger inside than outside, if that makes any sense. On the map it looks nothing: a gnarled pebble-shape at the end of the island of Mull. But once you're there, distances lose all meaning. It can take half a day to reach the south-western tip of the island. What I love more than anything is becoming nothing on Iona. On a wild day in October you are fighting the wind every step of the way. And all you are, all you have achieved, all that you think is important about you, is somehow blown out of you and away.

That matters to me as a writer as much as anything else. There is a very real danger of becoming self-conscious about the whole process of writing - poems in particular - and I find they happen these days when I am least conscious of the whole thought of writing. Poems should happen; they shouldn't be worried out of the pen. And on Iona they happen most often that way, and it means the world.

A few weeks back, my newest book of fragment poems was published by Wild Goose in Glasgow. All the poems in its pages are nearly Haikus: they are three-lined meditations on the island and on my long association with Iona. A Wee Book of Iona Poems should be there to find via Amazon: I hope it will be in the fullness of time. Or contact me and I'll send on a signed copy: info@kennethsteven.co.uk


A gannet
made of faith
gimlets the sea


The last ferry's gone -
a drawbridge has been lifted
and the island left behind.


Sometimes
it's about little more
than a boat on a blue sea.

The gateway to another country

I have often felt that it was possible to know the day autumn arrived. Something different in the air, as though the earth had tilted in the night. Something different about the light; something that could not be explained or written down or fully understood. Perhaps sometimes poems are there for those places where there is nothing else, no other way of explaining. They are meditations on places which have not been explored or explained before.

Of course this is just my corner of that experience in Highland Scotland. Inevitably it would be different in however many other corners of the world. Yet that doesn't lessen the experience; somehow it almost makes it the more special, the more precious. Which comes back anyway to all that poetry means - surely.


PEARS

I think of that house in early evening
Somewhere at the end of summer

All the doors and windows open
Filled with the afterglow of sun

And the whole house heavy with the scent of pears.
There in the lawn that ancient tree

A hundred summers old, and maybe more,
Around it a deep, dark ring of pears.

I picked them hour after long hour
To thud into baskets, heavy and melting -

Leaving only the broken ones,
All drizzled and wandering with wasps,

And it was as if the house became some strange ship
I was filling for a long voyage

That the rest of our lives might be made of pears.





The poem comes from Kenneth Steven's collection Coracle, published by SPCK in London

Summer

I have decided to return from silence! I am still new to the world of blogging, and I felt for a time that it was rather akin to knocking gently against a wall and receiving no answer. I look forward to hearing from those who do read new work, especially poems, and who want to be in touch. My email address, via my website, is: info@kennethsteven.co.uk. This is a short message on a summer evening: yesterday evening when coming back from my writing cabin in Highland Perthshire a poem came to me. Of course it had to be scribbled on the bus, and on the back of a scrap of paper, but I suppose that often the strongest things are. They tend always to come from nowhere - poems especially - and that arrival from silence is hugely special. So here is the poem:

Twelve

The way once upon a time it was:
when nights lay empty with their birdsong,
and the sun all swollen red went down,
and you among the boys went running
a whole hill upwards into dusk -
where the badger setts lay shadowed
and stillness danced with midges all around.

Then you knew there might be magic -
perhaps a falling star, or fox cubs,
or the finding of a cave that no-one else had seen.
Most of all it was the thrill of this -
the being twelve years old and knowing sure
that all the summer lay ahead and many more,
that it was yours like wild fruit heavy, ready -

in fields and fields and fields far out of sight.

Kindle

This is a brief message after too long a silence. The days have been out of this world here in Highland Perthshire: it has been the sort of winter I most love. Not deep snow around the house: bare ground and bitter frost. The crackling of every star from early evening: that bang of cold when the back door is opened after dark and the night, silent and huge, reveals itself. Impossible to go out for a bucket of coal and not stop to listen to the hugeness of the night. And there, last night, a deer only yards from the house. I felt that sense of awe and wonder I have felt so many times over the years: this privilege at being on the threshold of another kingdom. The deer waited and watched; I waited and watched, the pail hanging useless and pointless at my knee. It's often the kind of moment when poems come to the heart: they are out of time moments, sudden exits from the real, everydayness of the world into somewhere timeless, somewhere precious beyond words. But I didn't write any poem last night: I have visited and re-visited such moments here in Highland Perthshire, and it is difficult to go back and tread old ground in a new way.

What are there on Kindle is a volume of my selected poems especially put together for North American readers. Second Nature comprises much of my best-known work, but it's very much intended for an international readership. If you find it, pass on word of it. And look out for the deer.