Featured Writer in Federation of Writers (Scotland)'s newletter.

 Delighted to be Featured Writer in November's Federation of Writers (Scotland)'s Newsletter.

Featured Writer

This month we are delighted to welcome the winner of this year’s Alastair

Reid Poetry Pamphlet prize and co-curator of PoetryLit, Stephanie Green, as

our featured writer. As her biography shows, Stephanie has an excellent track

record as a writer and collaborator in poetic projects and has the distinction of

having been shortlisted for the Wigtown Poetry Prize this year as well. ‘The

Roider’, the poem she has chosen to share with newsmail readers, is one of

the poems in the prize-winning pamphlet: its visceral immediacy, economy of

language and the poignancy of its deeply moving ending amply demonstrate

the qualities of Stephanie’s writing which so impressed the Wigtown judges.

Biog.

Stephanie Green is Irish/English. Her pamphlets are ‘Glass Works’ short-listed

for the Callum McDonald Award, 2005, ‘Flout’ (HappenStance, 2015) and

‘Ortelius’ Sea-Monsters’ (Wigtown Festival Company, 2023), winner of the

Alastair Reid prize. She has collaborated with Sonja Heyer, Sound Artist,

creating poetry/sound walks: ‘Berlin Umbrella’ which appeared at StAnza,

2020 and ‘Rewilding’ (online at Writers’ Rebel) at the Orkney Nature Festival,

2023. She was shortlisted in the Wigtown main prize, 2023 and came 2nd in

the Poetry Wales Award, 2023. She co-curates ‘PoetryLit’ online, works as a

Dance reviewer and lives in Edinburgh. www.stephaniegreen.org.uk/

6

Roider

A dark red H – I once knew the word -

on the black funnels of whaling ships.

I pray your flesh, dark, red, will cure me,

but I must have nil by mouth,

strung up, fed with liquids like the gulps of sea

that swooshed through your baleen, a vast brush,

each cold, rubbery strand jammed tight,

trapping thousands of micro-organisms

as once every sensation, pulse of life,

filtered through my brain.

How many remembered now?

Synapses fizzling. Black-out.

Acrid smoke fluctuates, revealing

sunlit trees, as I walk through a wood

down to the beach holding my mother’s hand.

Who is the stranger who seems to know me

as she kisses my forehead? A young man

comes less often, and is impatient to be gone –

he seems familiar – one of my ship mates, perhaps -

who sniffs the kelp and salt on the wind

and hears, as I do, the call of the white seas.

Note: H stands for ‘hval’, Icelandic for whale.

This poem is taken from ‘Ortelius’ Sea-Monsters’ (published by Wigtown

Festival Company, 2023). It was the winner of the Alastair Reid pamphlet

prize. ‘The Roider’ was first published in the Rialto.

© Stephanie Green 2023