Jane's Writing Shed.

I'm often drawn to write about space related themes, so when I read that the closest neighbours to the Antarctic research base are the astronauts on board the ISS, that was enough to get me started. This poem was inspired by text and images by Dr Alexander Kumar published in the Guardian 2 July 2014. Minus eighty degrees If humans migrate into the sea of stars, this is how it might be one day. The Eastern Antarctic Plateau is white as Mars, the world's highest, driest desert. Wintering in the research base, Concordia, there's no way back for nine months, nothing for a thousand kilometers, nothing closer than the International Space Station. As much in common with space than earth, at night no-one locks doors and the only visitors consist of hallucinogenic day-glow flashes from the Aurora Australis, the Southern Lights. Above all cold. Cold that steals your breath. Unendurable, almost.

Probably the best ten quid I've spent all year. I bought my copy of A Bird is Not a Stone in the book tent at the Edinburgh International Book Festival not really knowing what to expect. Using 'bridge' or literal translations of poems by 25 Palestinian artists, 29 Scottish poets have written new versions of these poems with the originals printed alongside. The book aims to be 'a cultural exchange, giving readers an insight into the political, social and emotional landscape of today's Palestine..', which may sound a bit academic but the poems themselves are often beautiful evocations of loss, occupation, love, children, death. Political, particular and universal. To illustrate how the poetry in this book works on several levels, here's the shortest poem, written by Liz Lochhead. 'Poverty' by Tareq Al-Karmy Bridge translation by Sandra Ernst All the Viagra in the world won't make the economy stand up. This is a wonderful book that d...

I'm picky about the poems that I really like and one of my criteria is that a poem should have a sublime quality. The dictionary definition states that sublime means 'very high quality' which doesn't begin to describe what I mean by the word. After all one person's 'high quality' is another person's gobblydegook. My definition would include transcendence, taking me somewhere beyond words, provoking images or memories which are unexpected. Some of Elizabeth Bishop's and Michael Longley's poems have that sublime quality which take my breath away. Jorie Graham's poem Sundown also knocks my socks off. Here's an excerpt, Sometimes the day                                             light winces                                                     ...

After the rain Between the dark wood and caravan park, behind the beach at Yellowcraig, a field of corn was cut for another year, leaving pale gold stubble rows, ripe for raiding rooks and crows. As a hare sidled onto the far side  of the field it  kept nibbling as birds  dropped  down  around it. Then rain stomped down in furrows and I lost sight of the hare until looking up after the storm,  there  it was, paws outstretched, a cloud-hare sparring with  a cloud-crow  as stratus torn and holed was shot through with partial rainbows.

We've been visiting the Hundy Mundy Natural Woodland Burial Site near Kelso for several years since a dear young relative was buried there. This poem is for Albert. Hundy Mundy Burial Site Once here the dead become cocooned  inside  the earth. They shelter in grassed- over kists  within high stands of beech,  pine  and oak.  There are no tidy rows  and each lies  entirely  alone  on their own  meridian.  Their eulogies are written  in softening inscriptions  on flat-bedded  stones with wildflowers  and pine cones.  And in the last clearing  on the hill surrounded   by the Lammermuirs,  Eildons  and Cheviots,  there's a gothic folly named  for a Pictish Princess,  Hunimundias. I like to think the crows and rooks help to oversee this place which always welcomes, always waits.

Watching On a day when the News is full of horror and fear is more diffuse than ever,  I notice  the old jetty posts rotting in the mud  at Tyninghame  estuary  and abandoned World War Two concrete blocks at the edge of the wood.  Countless dead crustaceans  caught  in nets of grass are  scooped up in the strand-line  among the marran  and cockle sand. A dozen herons  are studying  the saltmarsh pools as an egret drifts away flying further round the spit. Dunlin feed on the  edge  of the incoming tide and like insects fly  as one when disturbed.  Then as the cries of curlew,  tern and geese wash through, I realise  I've lost sight  of what's happening beyond here, for now.

I love Edwin Morgan's poem ' A Too Hot Summer' for its feeling of sticky heat, mystery and the unsettling image of a dog, so I set myself a challenge to write a poem with the same title. I like the idea of writing poems based on the titles of poems written by loved and dead poets, so may write more on this theme. A Too Hot Summer Bright and strange as a thin fox out in daylight, glamour runs a leery path, beyond the hedge and unmown grass. Walking on stick-stiff legs, the fox ignores the hens staring from their pen, instead, like a dog, casually sits scratching an ear. July is a longed-for creature, flaunting its torrid colours, setting a trail  into every summer gone, energising pollinators, presaging autumn.