Northern Lights and Cloud Appreciation Society

Delighted my poem 'Da Mirrie Dancers' about the Northern Lights has been published on the Cloud Appreciation Society's website. See link below for fabulous photos. I'm really enjoying scrolling through all the beautiful photos from all over the world, plus the other cloud-inspired poems,  artwork and music.  The photos are updated daily.

“DA MIRRIE DANCERS” BY STEPHANIE GREEN

The skies rip open:
aurora borealis.
Fox-fire brushes the mountains.

I keep silent, in case light-storms
tangle in my hair.
Perhaps I’ll whistle, if I dare,
to bring them closer.

Green light rustles.
It’s the footsteps of the dead
from the world beyond the wind.

Unfolding, shimmering across the skies,
it fades to red.

My compass warped.

Note: Da Mirrie Dancers (The Merry Dancers) is the Shetlandic name for the Northern Lights.

‘Da Mirrie Dancers’ is in the author’s pamphlet Flout published by HappenStance, 2015.

https://cloudappreciationsociety.org/

Platinum dance my poem 'Ayre'.

Platinum rehearsing piece inspired by 'Ayre'.

I'm thrilled that one of my poems, 'Ayre' has inspired a dance piece choreographed by Matthew Hawkins and to be performed by Platinum dance group this Sunday 6th December, 2pm at the Queen's Hall, Nicolson Street, Edinburgh as part of the Dance Base Christmas Show. See The Queens Hall

I've just got back from watching the rehearsal and it was an incredibly moving experience. Exquisite choreography evokes the sense of tides breaking either side of a peninsula (tombolo) not quite in sync but echoing each other conveyed through 'gesture' and 'breath' .  This is a multi-layered work with complex patterning of gesture - turning it into something rich and strange, speaking its own language, arising from my poem but becoming something utterly itself and other.  Accompanied by eerie electronic music, an extract from 'Alone in Your Company' composed by Fabienne Audeod, the hairs on the back of my neck rose!  A great honour to have this wonderful work inspired by my poem.

Here is the original poem:

                                                 AYRE
                                                     (Tombolo*, St Ninian's Isle)

                                           Airy and eerie:
                                           a stretch of pebbles, a peninsula,
                                           where the opera of the tide is ever
                                           answering, echoing
                                           gesture with gesture,
                                           breath with breath,
                                           ecstatic airs
                                           from elsewhere.


* A 'tombolo' is a peninsula of sand and gravel on which the tide breaks on both sides, not necessarily simultaneously but more like an echo and response.

                                         (From my pamphlet 'Flout' (HappenStance Press, 2015)

Matthew is a former member of the Royal Ballet School who has since gone on to become a choreographer of note.  He currently also teaches at Dance Base. See  http://www.Matthew Hawkins Dance

Platinum is a dance class for those aged 60+  which meets regularly on a termly basis at Dance Base.
        http://www.dancebase.co.uk/       Look under 'Contemporary'.

Edinburgh Launch of Flout.

Edinburgh launch of 'Flout' at Looking Glass Books, The Quartermile, 1st June, 2015

This is what you get from asking your arty son to take photos during your reading.

A great event. So nice to see how many came despite freezing cold and rain - most un-June weather.   Having had the first launch at StAnza Poetry Festival, followed by sharing a Glasgow launch with 4 others at St Mungo's Mirrorball event last week, this was my most personal launch in my home town - so thrilled to have so many friends, not just the usual poetry crowd, turn up, so it was more of a party with a bit of poetry attached. And they all seemed to enjoy it, even those who don't usually go to poetry readings. I was especially chuffed that a large group of my dancer friends came along - being  'performative' creatures themselves, it was fascinating to hear their reactions - as interested in voice, pauses, gesture etc as the content.

Looking Glass Books must be the classiest bookshop/cafe in Edinburgh so I was thrilled to hold it there -note the black and white floor tiles, the shabby chic furniture and the magnificent mauve sofa (which I remember as a chaise longue but actually it's not) but great for reclining on, wine glass in hand like a modern Edna St. Vincent Millay or possibly Dorothy Parker, and to sit with each friend during the book-signing for a chat - it felt like giving private 'consultations'!

The Njuggle

So delighted to have my poem 'The Njuggle' chosen by Kim Moore on her Blog. Here's the extract:

I’ve chosen the poem The Njuggle  from Stephanie’s pamphlet.  A definition in the back of the book tells me that a Njuggle is a ‘demon water horse or pony found in Shetland and Orkney folklore’.  I love the story in this poem.  The language that Stephanie uses, like the word ‘scry’ in the second line, seems to fit with that folklore feel and that man’s face rising in the mirror in the third line reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Mirror’ when her face ‘rises towards her like a terrible fish’.  One of the things I love about this poem are the many wonderful words used to describe movement in it.  The piebald pony ‘ambled up’.  His muscles ‘shivered like water in the wind’.  When the Njuggle turns into water he ‘poured through my arms’.

I also love the idea of it – I’ve not heard of an Njuggle before, but the use of transformation in poetry is one I’m interested in at the minute and the story of an animal carrying off a human woman is an old and time-tested story.  The other thing to point out, which I’m sure you will have noticed is the wonderfully tight structure that holds this poem together.  It is very carefully put together.  The first and the third line of each three line stanza rhyme and many of the second lines of each stanza rhyme as well.

I’ve been reading so much Ovid recently, I can’t help thinking of it when I read this poem.  Stanza 4 reminds me of Europa when she is carried off by Jove in the form of a bull, and in the last complete stanza, when the Njuggle turns into water, it reminds me of the women in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who were turned into water to escape the unwanted attentions of one of the gods.

Thank you to Stephanie for letting me use this poem and do feel free to comment underneath, if you feel so moved.

The Njuggle – Stephanie Green

At midnight on Hallowe’en, my back to the moon,
I looked in the mirror to scry my lover-to-be.
His face rose like a drowned man’s.

At twilight I walked by the lochan in the hills
where the whaap’s cry wavers from the reeds.
A piebald pony ambled up.  His nostrils

pulsed as he blew into my hand.
Clicking my tongue, I patted his flanks
and his muscles shivered like water in the wind.

When he lowered his head, I knew I must mount.
I rode him through the night, gripping his back
between my thighs till I slid on our sweat

and he rolled me into cold, green fire.
I clung to his mane blooming with algae,
his shoulders encrusted with mussels and mire.

His hooves softened and opened into a fan
of fingers and toes.  Belly flattening, spine
whip-lashing, he bucked and shrank into a man.

As the dark fled, he turned to plunge me under
but dawn broke and he poured through my arms.
I was alone, calling, calling with no answer,

only the widening circles on the loch.

You can read  the full post here 

https://kimmoorepoet.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/sunday-poem-stephanie-green/

A preview of 'Flout' by the publisher:

AND ANOTHER THING POETRY CAN DO

is take you places. I mean real geographical places.

I’ve never been to the Shetland Islands but in the last few months I’ve published two pamphlets that took me there.

First there was Laurna Robertson’s Praise Song....

No, I have never been there. But I have been. And again in Stephanie Green’s Flout, I am back. No wonder people are drawn to the Shetlands, as Stephanie has been, a non-Shetlander: half Irish, half English, living in Edinburgh, but drawn to the islands again and again, their landscapes, their language, their gale-force winds


        Veering up the voe, swirling round the salmon-rings,
          ripping out the mussel strings,
            skerry-skooshing,
                 toft-tearing,
                    rock-wrenching gale.

Imaginary, mythic characters, larger than life, attractive and scary, loom eerily (the Njuggle and the Trowie, for example). But most of the all it’s the lonely landscapes that call, the far northern places where the poet encounters herself. In Steekit Stimna ‘Only the intense blue / of lochs, the long voes, / skies so pale they are transparent.’ And in the Keen of Hamar, at her feet, mysterious tiny plants, ‘a galaxy / of frog orchids, mouse ears, / moonwort, sandwort, sea plantain’.

Where else but the Shetlands could you juggle with place names like ‘the Peerie, the Muckle, / the Mid Heads o’ Yesness’, ‘the Kirn o’ Scroo’, and ‘the jagged fins of the Slithers’?

But all countries have that mystery of names, their curious rootedness. Something in place names calls to you, even when you have no idea where you really are, even when you’re just visiting on a poetry page. 

Posted by Helena Nelson on Sunday, 22 February 2015 in NEW HAPPENSTANCE PUBLICATIONS (HappenStance)

Flout arrives

My goodness!  Great excitement. My advance author copies of my pamphlet 'Flout' (HappenStance) arrived today.

I'm thrilled by the front cover designed by Gillian Rose, especially the characterful wee dragon or I should  say 'peerie' dragon since this book is inspired by Shetland.  It's a Norse/Shetlandic design and I do have a Stoor Worm,  a mythic dragon, in one of the poems!

Looking forward to its launch at StAnza - 6th March, 2015.  See  StAnza Border Crossings Event
Please do come, if you can.  If not, copies can be bought via  Happenstance .

My Selkie poem set to music, St Magnus Festival, 2013

Stephanie Green and Marisa Sharon Hartanto at the St Magnus Festival, Orkney, 2013

Back from the Orkney Writers' course: one of the most exciting experiences was hearing the verse of one of my poems, 'The Child of Breckon Sands'  set to music by a talented, young composer, Indonesian-born, Marisa Sharon Hartanto on the Composers' course.  It was sung  by the mezzo soprano Alison Wells in the Peedie Church, Kirkwall as part of a poet and composer masterclass at the St Magnus Festival where we also heard comments from the Director, Alisdair Nicholson.

Marisa's music was hauntingly beautiful and very evocative of what I was trying to achieve in my poem. I was thrilled with it, and also delighted to meet the charming Marisa. (I give her website below.)

 'The Child of Breckon Sands' is inspired by a selkie folktale from the Isle of Yell, Shetland.  Here is an extract:

My peerie boy, the only voices you hear haunting the dunes

are the shalder shaking loose its cry

and the rain-throated rain-goose:

                     a' wet, wet, wet,

                                waur wadder, waur wadder.

Notes on Shetlandic:

peerie - little

shalder - oyster-catcher

rain-goose:  red-throated diver, whose cry is said to presage rain.

waur wadder:  worse weather

The full poem will appear in my forthcoming pamphlet to be published by HappenStance in 2015.

Marisa Sharon Hartanto:    

www.marisasharonhartanto.com

also you can hear some of her other music on

https://soundcloud.com/marisasharonhartanto

Marisa's next production will be the music for an Indonesian (Wayang Golek) Puppet Show  by Mathew Cohen at the Clore, South Bank, London on 6th July, 2013.