Castings

A new collection of poems by Mandy Haggith, whose writing reflects her love for the land and her concern for the environment - not just in the North-West Highlands where she now lives on a woodland croft, but also in her travels around the world.

Praise for Castings:

‘The poetry here shows real clarity of eye marking the dialogues of nature in a place, be that place the lonely Scottish crofting area that is home, or the course of the River Kelvin through the Lowlands, or a Russian forest.’ Tom Leonard

‘Outstanding originality and quality. Impressive for its sharpness, sympathy and decisiveness...’ Alan Riach

‘There is so much to admire and enjoy in this collection: finely disciplined movement of cadence, formal and technical virtuosity, elegant economy of expression... the poetic language has a vivid and rich physicality... Vivid, witty and unusual, these poems juxtapose their carefully chosen words against the white expanses and spaces of the page.’ Andrew Radford

About Mandy Haggith

Mandy Haggith first studied Philosophy and Mathematics and then Artificial Intelligence, and spent years struggling to write elegant computer programs that could help to save the planet. A decade ago she left academia to pursue a life of writing and revolution, and has since travelled all over the world researching forests and the people dependent on them, and campaigning for their protection. In 2003, she returned to Glasgow University to study for an MPhil in Creative Writing, gaining a distinction. This is her first book-length collection of poetry. Her first novel, The Last Bear, is also published by Two Ravens Press. She lives on a woodland croft in Assynt, in the Scottish Highlands.

Mandy's blogs are at http://top-left-corner.blogspot.com and http://cybercrofter.blogspot.com

An Interview with Mandy Haggith

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

I had my first poem published aged 8 in a children’s magazine, when my favourite authors were AA Milne and Lewis Carroll. As I got older, writing was pushed aside in favour of an academic path that started with mathematics and ended in Artificial Intelligence. It took me until the age of 30 to admit that I really wanted to write, and it has taken me ten years to unlearn all the bad writing habits I accrued as an academic. I have been hugely inspired and encouraged by Tom Leonard. I found my poetic homeland reading imagist poets like H.D, and e.e.cummings and William Carlos Williams. Norman MacCaig is one of my favourite mountains in this land but I’m increasingly eclectic.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind Castings? And about what you were trying to achieve, what ideas you were trying to convey?

The single most important source of inspiration for my poetry is my home, the croft Braighlinne, on the shore of Loch Roe, in Assynt, Sutherland. Here, beside the Kelvin and elsewhere on the planet, I try to use poetry to communicate my awe and delight in the natural world and this chance to inhabit it.

How do you go about creating your voice on the page?

I write what I see, hear, smell, touch and feel. Then, usually, I try to take my intrusions out of the text as far as possible, whittling to achieve something minimal but sufficient to show what I’m trying to point the stick at.

How and when do you write?

I write every morning, pages of longhand stream of consciousness. Sometimes poems, or the beginning of poems, appear during this. I carry a waterproof notebook in my jacket pocket at all times. Often, a poem begins to emerge into consciousness when I’m walking and if I don’t get it down then I lose it. Often I simply jot phrases that join up later, for example during the next morning’s pages. I polish at the computer, normally best after nightfall.

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?

I cherish Philip Pullman’s advice, ‘read like a butterfly, write like a bee.’ I read a huge variety of things. The Guardian most Saturdays. Resurgence. I love novels. My favourite author at the moment is Barbara Kingsolver, a warm and enriching writer who makes it feel okay to be the woman I am. I loved Sandor Marais’ Embers. I’m reading a lot of travel writing at the moment, because I’m writing a travel book called Paper Trail. I loved John Steinbeck’s Russian Journal, and laughed my way around America with Jenny Diski’s Stranger on a Train. I’ve recently read Othello and Hamlet. I read poetry every morning before I get up: currently switching between Michael Longley’s Selected Poems, Vicki Feaver’s Book of Blood, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and a collection of Contemporary Women Russian Poets.

From Castings

Summer Smells of the Sea-Flowers

honeysuckle is a geisha girl
sweeping her silk sleeve perfume
through the woods at dusk

waltzing with a sailor boy
a salt-scent swell who swings up from the shore
limber and strong

their dancing
a maritime schmaltz
tugs

clinches

and twirls