Twilt is a poetic work in progress reflecting on the deep-time narrative of the River Deveron catchment in North East Scotland.
The project evolved during development and writing of the Pibroch collection (2020-2022) and  from reflections and insights during the 2023 Pibroch Tour.
Its key inspirations were
- That a river catchment – the ground beneath our feet – should be the fundamental unit of governance in the context of Climate Change
- That in order to imagine a survivable future we must re-imagine the past in the light of what we now know.
The project blends cosmological, geoscientific, archaeological and recorded & contested histories in an ongoing sequence of poems and animations, presented as text, spoken word performance and film-poems.
Twilt is written in Doric Scots. (A Doric-lite version is available for some of the film poems.)
The collection is structured in 5 distinct sequences
Ootsettin
Ingangin
Jizzen
Smelt
Blethers
The poems in In-gangin were premiered as a series of film-poems during the Royal Geological Society’s Earth Canvas event in September 2024.
Ootsettins was published in Poetry Scotland 103 Spring 22 and part of the Jizzen sequence, Rangifer, was published in Gutter 26 in October 2022. Hadean Eon :4.5 Billion Years Ago was published in Tales Fae The Doric Side, Doric Books in January 2023.