THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

David Robinson reflects on our changing reading behaviours as he reads William Boyd’s latest novel.

Love is Blind
By William Boyd
Published by Viking

Twenty years ago, at a  New York party hosted by David Bowie, William Boyd launched his monograph Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-60 about the abstract expressionist who destroyed 99 per cent of his work before committing suicide by jumping off the Staten Island ferry. The book appeared with a glowing tribute on the back jacket by Gore Vidal, and Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, spoke about Tate’s friendship with both Braque and Picasso.

There was just one problem. Nat Tate never existed. All those New York art experts at the party who claimed to know his work had been well and truly fooled. April Fooled, actually, and the fact that the party took place on 1 April and the subject had the names of two London galleries (Nat being short for National, and Tate) should have been a giveaway.

But look again at that date, and you can almost – almost – feel sorry for the people who were hoaxed.  Within a few months that kind of arty leg-pull would become a lot harder. That August, Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google. If the Nat Tate joke was a cultural landmark of a kind, theirs was a far bigger one. Just over a decade later, Google was dealing with a billion searches every day. And that in turn has affected the way we read.

Let’s look at Boyd’s latest novel, Love is Blind, to examine this change. If he had claimed that its protagonist, Brodie Moncur was a real-life consumptive Scottish piano-tuner of genius, working for John Kilbarron, (“the Irish Liszt”), the real-life piano virtuoso to promote Scottish Channon grand pianos around Europe in the late 1890s, it would be easy enough for us all to check whether he was telling porkies. Potentially, the internet makes us the less deceived.

That entirely fictitious set-up – along with Moncur’s love for Kilbarron’s mistress, Lika Blum, and an ingenious musical subplot – forms the core of the new book. But just as in his acclaimed 2002 novel Any Human Heart, Boyd drags a few famous real-life people into the mix – although this time he goes to  some trouble to mask their identity. So when Moncur meets a Russian doctor on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, we are told that he didn’t catch his name. Yet as this is 1897, and as the Russian is a doctor in his late thirties who is staying in the Pension Russe, drinking fermented mare’s milk in a bid to keep consumption at bay, and as Chekhov did all of those things too, I think we can safely say that we have Anton on deck.

Boyd is a Chekhov obsessive, and has re-read and studied him for the last 30 years. Go to his Chelsea home and there’s a photo of Chekhov on the mantlepiece. In 2012, when I interviewed him for Waiting for Sunrise, he was working on a play about the writer that was staged in London the following year. Called Longing, it was based on a revelatory short story ‘A Visit to Friends’ which Chekhov wrote – yes, in 1897, and in Nice.

Chekhov, though unnamed, appears in only half a dozen pages of Love is Blind, yet his spirit hovers over nearly all of it. Without the internet, I wouldn’t have realised how much. The fact that Moncur is, like Chekhov, a consumptive, is an obvious link, but there are many others, from a plot which can be seen as amplifying the closing lines of Chekhov’s short story  ‘The Lady and the Dog’ to a number of other details drawn from Chekhov’s own life.

I read Any Human Heart when it came out in 2002 and, like hundreds of thousands, loved it immediately. It works for two reasons. First, because it charts the inner life of Logan Mountstuart, as he bounces between careers as novelist, wartime spy, gallery owner, lecturer and impoverished pensioner, more convincingly than you would ever expect through using the (surprisingly rare) literary form of the intimate journal. Second, because of the sheer skill with which Boyd introduced real people into the narrative. No matter how implausibly exotic – Hemingway, the Duchess of Windsor – he placed them into the story as carefully as an expert fly fisherman, making sure there are no unnatural ripples on the surface.

But maybe there was a third reason too – one to do with me as a reader not Boyd as a writer. Back then, I let the novel wash over me. I immersed myself in the plot without pausing to check on its plausibility. I didn’t stop to examine, for example, the real-life murder of Harry Oakes when the Duke of Windsor was governor of the Bahamas in 1943. Even if I had wanted to, in 2002 that might still might not have been possible on the internet. That year, Wikipedia had only about 100,000 articles; now it has almost six million. Maybe Harry Oakes and his demise mightn’t have made it to cyberspace.

Now, with practically all of the facts in the world at my fingertips, I read differently. I read about Chekhov’s elder brothers Kolia and Alexander being alcoholics and his father being an abusive boor, and the circumstances in which Chekhov took his last drink of champagne and wonder whether that is the reason for an apparent mirroring of all these things in Love is Blind. And then there’s Lika.

In the novel, Lika Blum is the love of Brodie Moncur’s life. She is the reason the book has the title it does, because when it comes to her, his love really is blind. Type “Lika” and “Chekhov” into Google and you come up with the fact that Lika Mizinova was a blonde, buxom would-be opera singer, probably the great love of his life: 19 years old when Chekhov started a ten-year affair with her that was still continuing when he was in Nice in 1897. Who is the source of all this information? None other than William Boyd, writing a piece in The Guardian on the centenary of Chekhov’s death in 2004. So we shouldn’t perhaps be too surprised that the Lika here in his new novel – also a blonde, buxom, would-be opera singer – is very like the Lika there.

My point here isn’t to chart the extent of Love is Blind’s Chekhovian overlay but just to reflect on what the internet adds – and takes away from – reading fiction. Reading Boyd’s new novel  has also involved me looking at YouTube videos of piano tuning (a key plot point, oddly enough) as well as realising, perhaps even more deeply than I have done before, the complexities involved in  twisting the historical reality into credible fiction. I admire his craft as much as I ever have, even if the way I read – and maybe the way we all read – means I give in to it less.

Love is Blind is published by Viking, priced £20.

Yes, readers can’t seem to get enough of murder and mayhem solved by our vast array of detectives whether on the mean streets of our cities, or our picturesque, remote landscapes. Here’s a selection of some of the best new releases.

Sins of The Dead by Lin Anderson

Lin Anderson’s forensic science superstar is back for her thirteenth adventure which opens with a female Harley Davidson gang illegally racing in the old railway tunnel in Glasgow. They make a gruesome discovery: a dead body laid out in a way that mimics the medieval religious practice of sin-eating. There are few clues to help Rhona, and when another body is discovered near her home, she realises she is being stalked by a forensically aware killer.

All the Hidden Truths by Claire Askews

This debut, receiving great reviews and a lot of buzz, follows the story of the aftermath of an Edinburgh college massacre where 20-year-old Ryan Summers gunned down 13 fellow students before killing himself. The story is thoughtfully told through the characters of Moira Summers, Ryan’s mother, Helen Birch, the newly-promoted detective inspector investigating the case, and Ishbel Hodgekiss, the mother of one of the victims.

After He Died by Michael Malone

Michael Malone gives us another expert slice of domestic noir, telling the story of newly-widowed Paula Gadd, who is stunned when a young woman approaches her at the funeral, slipping her a note suggesting that Paula’s husband was not all that he seemed. An unpredictable thriller that wrong foots the reader at every turn, this is a novel that will make you question whether you can ever truly know anyone.

In the Silence by M. R. Mackenzie

Another intriguing debut, which sees Anna, a criminology lecturer based in Rome, return home to Glasgow to help celebrate an old friend’s birthday. In the one of the worst winter’s Glasgow has had, Anna bumps into her ex-boyfriend while on the night out. When he is murdered, she becomes the star witness and decides to investigate his death herself. She soon realises that the motive lies closer to home. . .

The Shadow of the Black Earl by Charles E. McGarry

Leo Moran returns for his second outing swapping his life in the West End of Glasgow for a visit to Biggnarbriggs Hall, the stately home of his friend Fordyce Greatorix. In the rolling hills of the Dumfries-shire countryside, Leo is delighted when romance starts to blossom. But he cannot escape who he is, and when he finds himself plagued by visions after a local girl goes missing, he is reminded of a similar disappearance thirty years previously.

The Relentless Tide by Denzil Meyrick

The hugely popular DCI Daley is back for his sixth adventure alongside his much-loved sidekick DS Brian Scott. The sleepy village of Kinloch is thrilled when a team of archaeologists believe they have discovered Viking remains, but the delight turns to horror when it becomes clear that these are the missing victims of the `Midweek Murderer’, a serial killer at work in Glasgow in the early 1990s – one of Daley’s first ever cases.

The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry

Co-written by the bestselling writer Christopher Brookmyre and his wife, consultant anaesthetist Dr Marisa Haetzman, The Way of All Flesh is a rip-roaring tale of murder amid the medical experiments of 19th-century Edinburgh. Bright and ambitious medical student,Will Raven, is suspicious about a spate of mysterious deaths in the New Town, as is Sarah Fisher, housemaid to Raven’s renowned tutor, Dr Simpson. Can they overcome their differences to solve these gruesome murders?

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith

Another book in the Cormoran Strike series, written by J K Rowling under a pen name, is always a big publishing event: expect this book to rocket up the charts on its release this week. In Lethal White, the relationship between Strike and his agency partner, Robin Ellacott, is under the microscope while they negotiate political factions at play in Westminster while the rest of the country celebrate the London 2012 Olympics. And following his newfound fame as a private eye, Strike realises he can no longer operate behind the scenes as he once did.

And that’s just a taster. Check out the Bloody Scotland programme for more crime fiction recommendations. You are really spoiled for choice. . .

On 31 December 1918, hours from the first New Year of peace, hundreds of Royal Naval Reservists from the Isle of Lewis boarded the HMY Iolaire at the Kyle of Lochalsh to return home. As the boat headed into Stornoway pier, she piled onto rocks off the coast. 205 men drowned, on their own doorstep, in front of their loved ones. In one of the most eagerly-anticipated novels of year, As the Women Lay Dreaming explores the aftermath of this worst peacetime British disaster at sea, the grief, the survivors’ guilt, and the changes over time to a close-knit community. The novel will be released for Remembrance Day in November, and BooksfromScotland are thrilled to bring you an exclusive pre-publication extract.

Extract taken from As the Women Lay Dreaming
By Donald S Murray
Published by Saraband

It took me years to look at my grandfather’s journals. For decades they remained with me, undisturbed and unopened for fear that if I ever prised open their covers, the ghosts and demons of my own childhood, their sense of loss and sorrow, would leap out and overwhelm me, emerging from the darkness of my dreams. Besides, there was always so much to get on with. The everyday business of my own existence. My work as an art teacher in a secondary school in Glasgow. The joys and travails of my own family life, one that seemed, on occasion, to follow the pattern of my grandfather’s days. I, too, have had two marriages. Getting on in years now – already older than he was back then – and finding it hard to cope with the energy of my son, Jamie, I have often looked back with envy at the tolerance, patience and love my grandfather showed me. There have all too often been times when I could muster none of these, when I longed to be free of Jamie’s shadow, when I wanted to escape the hold that duty and obligation had over my life.

It was, perhaps, because of all this that I put off looking at my grandfather’s writing. His journals had all been created in the years after World War One and the Iolaire disaster in which he had been involved, each note and jotting an attempt to make sense of all that had happened at that time, a re-creation, too, of his original diaries, the ones he had lost when the ship went down in Stornoway harbour. In their rank disorder, they reminded me too much of my own life, the anarchy I felt within my own spirit: the way that one observation veers into another, perhaps mingling incidents that occurred over the distance of decades; the confusion of languages, Gaelic and English, blurring the sense of his words; even the fact that there are several events which I recall and I am sure – from my own memory – that he didn’t get quite right.

There is also the disintegration of his handwriting from time to time, the scribble of his pen when ink might have been running short in the household. The same is true of his drawings. Clear and fluid when he employed his pencil in the early days, they became indistinct in the later stages of his life, ragged and faint on paper. There are times, too, when I am all too aware of the limitations of his skill. Many of the women he drew possessed the same expression as his first wife, Morag. Such as the drawings of my mother, his own daughter Mairi, someone I suspect that he – just like me – barely knew as an adult. Or, indeed, the sketches of my sister, Rachel. The black curls. Grey eyes. Dimples. They all seem to merge into one portrait, allowing Morag to age in the form of an old woman working in the peats, to become young again in the expressions of his grandaughter. All in all, it was as if, despite her death many years before, she had become immortal, gaining the gift of not only eternal youth but also continual ageing, moving back and forth over the years. And so it is with much of his work. Time reels back and forth, shifting like a shuttle in one of those Hattersley looms that used to be heard around the village for years on end. It is very hard to make sound or sense of it.

And so I set all these things from me, pushing them to the side. It is only in the last decade or so – my son at long last gone from our home and just a few years from the centenary of the one event that so marked and darkened my grandfather’s life, as it did so many others living on the island – that I decided to pick up the journals again, trying to make sense of both their words and drawings. For all that it has taken me many years to do this, it seems to me important to try and provide both form and shape for the multiplicity of voices that are found within those pages, even occasionally try to fix my awareness of those years in the knowledge I have acquired since then, sometimes stepping out of my own skin and seeing the world as it might have appeared to an adult, imagining what it must have been like for him to take on the care of two children who had been bruised and damaged by their own early contact with the world, re-imagining his loss as if it were mine, narrowing my vision down till it blurred and blended with his own.

Writing down these words as if there was no distinction between us.

As if the incidents might have happened to me.

As if his every thought were my own.

As the Women Lay Dreaming is published by Saraband, and priced at £8.99.

In Who Built Scotland: 25 Journeys in Search of a Nation, five of Scotland’s most prominent writers and historians rediscover Scotland’s history through their appreciation of some of Scotland’s most iconic buildings. In one chapter, a rumination on Scotland’s most famous church – Auld Alloway Kirk – sends James Robertson on a journey back into his own family history.

Extract from Who Built Scotland? 25 Journeys in Search of a Nation
By Kathleen Jamie, Alexander McCall Smith, James Robertson, Alistair Moffat and James Crawford
Published by Historic Environment Scotland

Near the village of Evanton on the north side of the Cromarty Firth, is yet another ruinous church. You leave the A9 and go down a single-track road to the burial ground of Kiltearn, right on the shoreline. There is a new cemetery here, but the one that interests me surrounds the now derelict old parish church. This structure dates from the late eighteenth century, and many of the nearby gravestones are of similar or older vintage. Like Kirk Alloway, the site was previously occupied by older religious buildings, possibly including a medieval monastery.

Kiltearn’s proximity to the shore suggests that access by water may once have been as important as access by land, but after the Second World War its location became too inconvenient for the population of Evanton and it ceased to be used for worship. Photographs from the 1960s show it with its roof and windows still intact, but the slates and roof timbers were stripped soon afterwards and it is now in a very poor condition. Rabbit activity has undermined some of the old graveyard, and the retaining wall which protects it from the sea is also in need of attention. It remains, however, a remarkably beautiful and peaceful place. When you stand among the stones and tablets crowded at odd angles across the green turf, and look to the sea, you are caught between two ages, the pre-industrial and the post-industrial: oil rigs sit out on the water, anchored like some vast art installation or a herd of metallic monsters – all intestinal pipes, craning beaks and claws and rusted legs. The number of rigs changes all the time. They are brought in to the shelter of the Cromarty Firth for refitting or repair or, increasingly, just because they are no longer needed out in the North Sea.

To one side of the roofless kirk is a plot enclosed by a foot-high cast-iron fender. Centuries-old tablets lie half-submerged within this boundary. There is also an upright sandstone slab, eight foot high and ten foot wide, so weathered that most of the names and dates have disappeared and only a few words are still legible: BELOVED, DIED, TAKETH, TRUST – and ROBERTSON. This is one of the principal resting-places – the other is at Rosskeen, between Alness and Invergordon – of my once-wealthy ancestors, the Robertsons of Kindeace.

This northern branch of a clan whose heartland was in Highland Perthshire traces its lineage back to a merchant of Inverness, John Robertson, who flourished in the mid-fifteenth century. A William Robertson purchased land at Kindeace, twelve miles north of Kiltearn, in 1629. Successive generations acquired more land, farmed well, occasionally fought duels but by and large steered clear of disputes, whether personal or political. By the 1700s the lairds of Kindeace and their kin were prominent, prosperous, stoutly Presbyterian members of Ross-shire society: Jacobitism, even of a romantic, after-dinner kind, would not have been one of their indulgences.

Numerous children were produced by the wives of these lairds: of those that reached adulthood, the daughters either stayed at home to help run the household or were married off to neighbouring lairds, Edinburgh lawyers or London gentlemen, while the sons became ministers, lawyers, merchants, planters or – especially – soldiers. The family’s deep engagement in the burgeoning British Empire brought considerable rewards but sometimes at a great cost. In the second half of the eighteenth century Charles Robertson, the 5th Laird, had nine sons who survived infancy: one inherited the estate, one had a career as an army officer and two went into business in London; the other five all died overseas, three of yellow fever, one in battle in India, and one ‘of lockjaw, occasioned by the biting of a snake’.

The present Kindeace House – a sturdy construction of four storeys – was built in 1798 and redesigned and extended in the 1860s. You sense, looking at its crow-stepped gables and symmetrical frontage, that these Robertsons liked things plain and functional: it was how they lived their conventional and comfortable lives. The high point of the family’s fortunes was the nineteenth century, but things went into steep decline after the death of the 8th Laird in 1902. A combination of poor financial management and heavy taxes after the sudden demise of the heir, Gilbert, led to the land and the house itself being sold, and its seven surviving daughters and sons dispersing to Glasgow, England, South Africa, New Zealand and Canada. Among them was my paternal grandfather (who was born in 1877 and died in 1959, a year after I was born) and his sister Helena, or ‘Great Aunt Nella’, born in 1869. She lived to be nearly ninety-nine and my parents once took my sister, brother and me to see her at her home in London: I was three or perhaps four and remember only an austere, papery old lady clad in long black clothes. I was quite frightened, although she gave us chocolate bars.

All this history is a mere two generations away from me, yet it seems remote and ancient, not least because I have always felt politically at odds with what these ancestors of mine represent. Standing before that big sandstone memorial to them at Kiltearn, from which wind and rain have stripped nearly all their names, is like standing before a classroom blackboard, trying to decipher the rubbed-out lessons of the previous day.

The paperback of Who Built Scotland: 25 Journeys in Search of a Nation is published by Historic Environment Scotland, and is priced £9.99.

James Robertson is the Booker-longlisted author of highly acclaimed novels including And the Land Lay Still, The Testament of Gideon Mack, and To Be Continued

An interview and reading with Kirstin Innes at The Edinburgh Bookshop on the return to print of her bold, brilliant and award-winning debut novel.

Fishnet
By Kirstin Innes
Published by Black and White Publishing

At BooksfromScotland we are delighted to see Kirstin Innes’s Fishnet back in print with the great folks at Black and White Publishing. Acclaimed far and wide on its original publication, Kirstin’s tale of Rona Leonard on the hunt for her missing sister within the sex industry that claimed her will challenge you and stay with you long after the final page. The new edition of the novel has an  afterword where Kirstin looks back at the journey she made while writing the novel, and its reception. She also pays tribute to Laura Lee, a committed sex-work campaigner, on her influence and inspiration. Many reviewers have hailed Fishnet an important book. Get yourselves a copy and find out why.

BooksfromScotland wish to thank The Edinburgh Bookshop for letting us share their interview.

We have 5 signed editions to give away to 5 lucky readers. All you have to do to get yourself one of those copies is to email editor@booksfromscotland.com with the subject heading Fishnet. Good luck!

Fishnet is published by Black and White Publishing, priced £8.99.

Artist Amanda Thomson curates and preserves for posterity those wonderful words of the Scots language relating to the world around us.  It’s a joy to discover the deeply expressive vocabulary that has been used to describe land, wood, weather, birds, water and walking in Scotland.

Extract from A Scots Dictionary of Nature
by Amanda Thompson
Published by Saraband

This Scots Dictionary of Nature has been a long time in the making. As an artist, much of my work is about the Scottish Highlands, and in 2010, when I made an artist’s book called A Dictionary of Wood (which would be a first version of what you are reading now), I was doing research about the remnant Scots pinewood forests of Abernethy, and about Culbin, a Forestry Commission forest in Morayshire. Earlier that year, in a second-hand bookshop in Edinburgh, I had found an old Jamieson’s A Dictionary Of The Scottish Language, abridged by John Johnstone and published in 1846. The original price of £11 was embossed in gold on the spine, and I bought it for £20. In opening random pages, I’d come across words such as timmer breeks (timber trousers), meaning a coffin, and dedechack: the sound made by a woodworm in houses, so called from its clicking noise, and because vulgarly supposed to be a premonition of death.

I loved these words and more: they had a resonance and a particular feeling to them that was sometimes poignant and affecting, and sometimes conveyed a prosaic descriptiveness that nonetheless spoke of close connections and an attentiveness to the nuances of the landscape, what it contains, how we move through it, and even specific times of day or year. Break-back: the harvest moon, so called by the harvest labourers because of the additional work it entails. There were also words like huam: the moan of an owl in the warm days of summer, evocative of that feeling of the haziness of a long, hot summer’s day as it spills into evening. This old dictionary made me begin to wonder about lost connections to land and place and perhaps even ways of seeing and being in the world, and I began wondering what else I might find.

Eard-fast means a stone or boulder fixed firmly in the earth, or simply, deep rooted in the earth, and it’s a word that seems to get to the heart of this book. It resonates with ideas of place and belonging, makes me think of deep connections to places and particular landscapes and makes me consider how language can assist or be at the root of such connections.

Between 2009 and 2013 I was doing a doctorate and an element of my research related to the gradual changes that happen over time in the forests of Morayshire and Abernethy and how, when one is familiar with a place, one sees many more layers and begins to recognise the subtlest of these changes. I was also interested in how we make sense of and articulate our relationships to the land, both visually and verbally. As I walked with foresters and ecologists, I came across words like gralloch, used by a deerstalker to describe the innards of a dead deer (and the verb to gralloch, which so viscerally describes the task of removing them). Such words were unfamiliar to me, and yet foresters and ecologists used them with ease and specificity to describe their everyday activities. As I listened and heard these new (to me) words, they informed additional ways of seeing and gave me different understandings of the places where I was walking and of the activities they were carrying out. And there were other phrases too, some quirky, others pithy. An older forester told me about a man who started working for the Forestry Commission but was not very good at his job: he was not “wid material”, the forester said.

. . .

I’m not a lexicographer, a linguist, or a historian of the Scottish language, but as an artist I am interested in words and language and how we might describe our world. In mining these dictionaries, I’ve found words that are rarely heard, no longer in use or perhaps largely forgotten. These “found” words evidence a confluence of local and social histories, allude to changing ways of life and shifting connections, and point to fascinating relationships with nature and the land. Some show how land and nature permeate other aspects of our lives. The word flocht relates to birds and means on the wing, but then there’s to flochter, which means to give free scope to joyful feelings. Others give us immediate access to a language and a way of being in the world, being on and in the land, which may or may not be the same as now. While we see the same weather phenomena today, more or less, as when the Jamieson dictionary was published – over a century and a half ago – the impact and significance of particular kinds of weather is probably, for most of us, not the same. Naming denotes importance and significance, and the ability to notice angry teth (the fragment of a rainbow appearing on the horizon, and when seen on the north or east indicating bad weather), to recognise Banff-baillies (white, snowy-looking clouds on the horizon, betokening foul weather), or to observe that the day is lunkie (denoting the oppressive state of the atmosphere before rain or thunder) has very different implications for car drivers or city-dwellers than for someone out in a small fishing boat or for a farmer assessing whether the barley should be harvested.

A Scots Dictionary of Nature by Amanda Thompson is published by Saraband, priced £12.99.

Wild Goose Press have released an audio CD celebrating the beauty of the island of Iona. Poet Kenneth Steven has collaborated with musician Wendy Stewart and producer Mark Richards to create a soundscape that captures the island’s unique atmosphere, its spirituality, and its nature.

The Sound of Iona: Poems and Music Inspired by the Landscape
By Kenneth Steven, with music by Wendy Stewart
Published by Wild Goose Publications

Kenneth told BooksfromScotland:

‘It was Jane MacFadyen on Iona who first gave me the idea of recording an island soundscape. The best ideas are often the most obvious, and finally it has been made: a melding of the wind and the waves, the laughter of children, the sounds of birds, together with some of the poems I have written over the years. This soundscape is for those who know Iona as much as it’s for those who have always wanted to find a way of reaching Columba’s holy isle.’

Enjoy these audio extracts.

Iona

And God said:

Let there be a place made of stone

Out off the west of the world,

Roughed nine months by gale,

Rattled in Atlantic swell.

A place that rouses each Easter

With soft blessings of flowers

And shocks of white shell sand;

A place found only sometimes

By those who have lost their way.

The Hermit’s Cell

I had to listen for a silence

that was born inside.

It took a whole year to find

and now it does not fail.

I need nothing:

all I want is where I am.

I used to pray, and praying then

was struggle with myself.

Now I am made prayer, am hollowed out –

a song that needs no sound.

I pick the blow of flowers, bring them back

in blues and reds and golds,

and in the slow of winter dark

I watch for dawn and know

that I am growing into light

a little every day.

Both poems were originally published in Coracle, SPCK

The Sound of Iona, by Kenneth Steven with music by Wendy Stewart is released through Wild Goose Publications, and is £6.63.