From Lokis (1869) by Prosper Mérimée
“We are now coming into a forest, Professor, where the kingdom of the animals still flourishes—the matecznik, the womb, the great nursery of beasts. According to our national traditions, no one has yet penetrated its depths; no one has been able to reach to the heart of these woods and thickets, except for poets and magicians, who can travel everywhere. […] Lions, bears, elks, the joubrs, our wild oxen or aurochs, all live very happily together. The mammoth, who is preserved there, is highly thought of; he is, I believe, the Marshal of the Diet.”
Matecznik News
New online resource for Lapidus Scotland
Here is the link to a resource Rebecca Sharp has created for Lapidus Scotland for their online toolkit. It focuses on themes explored in How Do We Talk About Knives, the anthology edited by Rebecca, Marcas Mac an Tuairneir and Samina Chaudhry and published by Matecznik in 2023. It’s well worth a look - Rebecca has come up with some really interesting questions which got me thinking about my name and how I feel about it. (Fairly positive on the whole but Rebecca encourages you to probe a little deeper than that.)
New publications
Matecznik Press is delighted to announce the publication of Trembling Earth, a new collection by Finola Scott. This is what poet and translator Taylor Strickland has to say about Finola’s poems: ‘Punchy, straightforward, undaunted, Trembling Earth moves seamlessly between Scots and English, confirming Scott’s place among today’s makars.’
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Also available in our online shop is waterlines, the subtle and complex first collection by Élodie Laügt. Here, to whet your appetite, is the short text Élodie wrote for the back cover:
‘waterlines is an invitation to follow penelope as one wait ends and another begins, in renewed invention. she paints rather than weaves, and distances shift as a result. each of the poems in this precise collection measures these transformations and displacements.’
Peter Mackay - distinguished poet in Gaelic and English, St Andrews academic and newly-appointed Scottish Makar - has this to say about Élodie’s work:
‘These poems are beautifully, delicately balanced, fluid, light, with a perfectly pitched humour and an ability to make even “forbearance” strange. This is an assured, seriously playful voice.’
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And - hot on the heels of waterlines (to mix metaphors) - comes another fine first collection. A Grazing Light by Keren Macpherson is now available from the online shop. This is what eminent poet and translator Anna Crowe writes about Keren’s poems:
‘Technically adroit and formally accomplished, the poems in A Grazing Light astonish, enlighten and move us by turn. Largely ekphrastic, drawing on works by Henry Moore, Fragonard, Klee, van Gogh, William Gillies, Picasso, Monet and others, they reveal a wonderful eye and a musical ear at work.’
How Do We Talk About Knives
Beth McDonough has written an excellent review of How Do We Talk About Knives, together with Jean Taylor’s Litany of Coal, in DURA (Dundee University Review of the Arts): https://dura-dundee.org.uk/2023/12/19/where-and-who-we-are-two-pamphlets/?fbclid=IwAR05yDT94t3wAj2UtTBLApTQkPqXsAZ_mKbDN0Nw4OqwCuXUFf36MjYLI34
Listen to Vahid Davar being interviewed by Mary Blance for The Books Programme on BBC Radio Shetland: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001t8qt
Interview with Vahid Davar
Poet and gallery owner Beth Junor has recorded an interview with Vahid, now available to view on Beth’s website: https://junorgallery.scot/art-and-poetry-videos/
The full text of Vahid’s contemporary epic, Nassim’s Testament, appears in English and Persian in the Atlas of the World, an artist book created by Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian, a Dubai-based artist collective from Iran. The Atlas was exhibited at Laurel Parker Book studio in Romainville near Paris this summer:
https://www.laurelparkerbook.com/en/projects/rrhv-atlas-of-the-world/
‘Portrait of a Poet’ by Lindsay Macgregor
For a while now I’ve been meaning to post new poems that have impressed me by poets whose work I admire. You can find the first of these, ‘Portrait of a Poet’ by Lindsay Macgregor, in the ‘Poems’ section of the website. Lindsay’s new collection, Desperate Fishwives, has just been published by Molecular Press; if you’d like to purchase a copy - which I’d strongly recommend - you can contact Lindsay directly: 7lindsay12@gmail.com/
