The roots of the Pibroch project run deep in my experience and practice. Throughout my writing career I’ve felt the need to engage with the realities of working life, and often working life in oil provinces such as Aberdeenshire, Azerbaijan and Angola.
As we move towards rehearsals for Pibroch, I’ve been reflecting on those roots, both in my poetry and my prose writing. Lives built around – or affected by – oil-frontier culture has been a thread through much of my writing since the 1980s. ‘Write what you know’ they say : and I knew oil & gas, from the well-heads to the cloud-base of geopolitics.
I’ve written about divers – I started out researching diving operations in the early 1980s – about the machinations of energy companies around the time of the 2nd Gulf War in 2003 and about the dystopian culture that extractivists – whether corporate of individual – nurture in countries like Angola.
The comments of fellow poets, for example on my first collection, Fallen Stock, acknowledge that emphasis on working life, and the ambivalence of working in that particular sector of industry.
“These pieces speak from the seams between nature and industry, present and past, with an unflinching commitment to portraying reality in all its rough complexity.” Katie Ailes.
“There is a blue-collar muscularity and an urgency to get right the exact details of labour, landscape and memory.” Martin Malone.
Not all of this work is in print (yet)…but a number of these short-stories and poems have been published in magazines and anthologies. The Truth About Harry – a vignettes set in Baku is available from this website and others be accessed among back issues of Pushing Out the Boat available online.
Pushing Out the Boat, to commemorate its 10th Anniversary, organised a series of radio broadcasts last year, in collaboration with shmu FM, to showcase writers who had been associated with the magazine over that period. It was a privilege to be chosen as one of the readers.
I spent a very pleasant afternoon in the studio with Loraine Mudie, reading a number of poems first published in Pushing Out the Boat including The Type and Retention Bonus. Loraine & I read the 3 segments published as 3 North East Vignettes, a climate-check on the world that was Aberdeen around 2013, an exploration of grief and dislocations. The readings were threaded together with discussion of my practice, an eclectic selection of music Loraine had chosen and reflections on how these pieces related to Pibroch and my current projects.
The recordings was broadcast on 15th September as part of shmu FM’s Words Up series and are still available to listen and download from the Pushing Out the Boat website here.
The Type, Retention Bonus and other related poems – including Thin Ice – first published by Luath Press in Aiblins – also formed part of my first poetry collection, Fallen Stock, available here or from my publisher, Red Squirrel Press.