"My collected poems would run to around 250 pages, half or maybe a bit less in Scots. I have also written prose fiction - a couple of short narrative sketches and folktales, the latter mostly in Socts. Most are reworking of well-known or well-travelled tales, such as a prose version of the Border ballad 'Tam Lin' and a very Scottish version of the South African folk story Abi Yo Yo (both of which were published in The Eildon Tree.

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Many of my poems emerge as a response to the landscapes, soundscapes, creatures and features in the natural world. Many were written long before I encountered the term 'geopoetic,' but I think many of them may belong under that umbrella, in so far as I understand it. They divide, superficially, into those that arise from the green hills of the Borders - a land of trees and shining rivers, especially the Tweed; and those that arise from the West Coast and its Glamour of Islands, especially Mull and Iona, and our retreat in North West Sutherland - an entirely different land with ocean, mountains and vast open spaces. My poetry is simply a response to being alive in these places. Many poems derive from encounters which stick in the mind and insist on being written about.

  

I have written a fair number of bairnrhymes in Scots in the tradition of William Soutar, J.K. Annand, and McDiarmid’s Bubblyjock. Mostly responses to real-life incidents and encounters, and written in the first instance for my children. Having children is a life-voyage of rediscovery and renewal. I like to think of these wee poems as a way of sharing and learning how “the world offers itself to your imagination … announcing your place in the family of things”.

 

Some of my poems are historical – often narrative monologues referring to familiar events in Scottish history, coming at them not from the point of view of a historical character, but a little person, someone a long way from fame and power whose voice or experience is only recorded in the imaginings of those who come after. Inevitably, many of these subjects are women – for example, how did Jean Armour feel about being the widow of Robert Burns?

 

I also have an ever-growing repertoire of ‘owersettins,’ or translations from English into Scots. These are mostly of well known poems from the canon, going back as far as Thomas Wyatt, and as recent as Mary Oliver. Some recent ones have been by request, but otherwise I am not sure what makes a poem a candidate for such a treatment. Relative shortness? I like to think they assert that any treasured thing done in English - a Shakespeare sonnet, a lyric from Tennyson – can be done in (oft-maligned) Scots. The effect is often startling, like meeting an old friend in different clothes. All but the most recent of these exist in a large-print, laminated edition, which can be set up in parallel texts as an exhibition. These poems were displayed in the local musuem during 2015's Peebles Arts Festival.

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I also have a wee sub-set of owersettins from a book of children’s poems called ‘Prayers from the Ark,’ written in French by Carmen Bernos de Gasztold and originally translated by the novelist Rumer Godden. The concept of prayers from each animal appealed, and they seemed to emerge well from owersettin, so I ended up treating all but the more pious of them.

 

There are many poems which would evade such categories, but I think the above would catch most of them."

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