Biography
I have a broad range of poetic interests and influences. I am never happier than when reading an international anthology of poems.
I am an immigrant, a traveller, and I am fascinated by 'geographies' in the broadest sense -- physical places as well as imaginative terrain. My work is the writing of nature and place, whether physical landscapes, or inner spaces of body and mind.
My abiding fascination with the writing of place stems from formative experiences of a "lost world”—Scotland, where my family lived until I was three—and a "transplanted world"—Canada. This conflict-generating displacement inspires my poetry. I am particularly influenced by Scottish poets (George Mackay Brown, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson), Canadian ones (Elizabeth Bishop, Sue Goyette, the Villanelles - my poetry group), as well as Ellen Bass from the US, the late Meena Alexander, and Lucille Clifton.
My work has been a finalist for prizes including the Arc Poetry 'Poem of the Year' 2020 and The CBC Poetry Prize 2021.
I live in Kingston, Ontario, was born in Glasgow, and count Brazil, India and a cabin in the north woods near Bancroft as among my most inspiring of places.
Micro-interview
Yes I did. I read Patti Smith's Babel and it was an event in my life. I was a punk and I'd heard her music, which to me was poetry. The thrill of hearing "Because the Night" has never left me. My idea of what was possible changed when I saw Smith's wild lyrics and poems and sketches in book form. And it made me realize that poetry is sonic, akin to music.
An inspiring teacher also introduced us to ee cummings -- "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond" I recall loving. It was quite the change from Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, which I'd had to memorize in grade school, and loathed!
I started writing poetry when I was in high school. Then I thought, 'I have to make a living' and went to journalism school. I didn't write poetry for about 20 years. Slowly, secretively, I started to do so again. It's only been the past few years I've thought of myself as a poet. I've just completed my first book of poems.
Perhaps to inspire, and to share the beauty and elegance and solace and surprise of poetry, a neglected, misunderstood form that needs to be available to all. We turn to poetry in the most difficult of circumstances, to express, to lean on and sustain us -- yet in a capitalist world where everything has to be 'useful,' we devalue it. Pascal said "Always keep something beautiful in your mind." Poets can help reveal poetry's capacity for elevating and moving us, for touching on our shared humanity. And gesture toward poetry's dissident, truth-telling power on the margins in our materialistic, technology obsessed society.