In the Hanging Valley

A collection of poetry by Orkney poet Yvonne Gray.

Praise for In the Hanging Valley:

‘Yvonne Gray’s poems breathe with the air of Orkney, where she lives and works. She is a musician as well as a poet and one can detect the musician’s ear in her writing. Her poems stitch images into a fabric: one rich and textured but at the same time light and unshowy. They address the changing landscapes of a dear place, its rich history and wildlife. They pay homage to artists and musicians, to people of the past as well as those of the present. With words she paints the picture, the music.’ Christine De Luca

‘Yvonne Gray’s poems represent a taut lyric of images, people and places. The words are well-chosen; each phrase is apt to the sensation, the experience, to the driven-ness of the poem. Here is a poet who is aware of the tensions and nuances which make up the modern world, but behind it there is an awareness of a more ancient acoustic: one which makes us who we are.’ George Gunn

'Yvonne Gray takes her materials by right: land and its music, boats on water, flesh, yearning and mourning. She will dip her finger in cold salt and trace your life's horizon.' Todd McEwen

About Yvonne Gray

Yvonne Gray was born in Ayrshire and grew up in Renfrewshire, Lanarkshire and Midlothian. She studied at Edinburgh University then worked in Angus as an English teacher and oboe instructor. In 1990 she moved to Orkney and settled near Stromness with her husband and three sons. She teaches English part-time and is a keen musician.

She has been involved in several collaborations, including Rationed Air (with artist Carol Dunbar), Between the Terminals, a film for the St. Magnus Festival, Poetry in Place (Orkney Creative Writing Fellowship) and the exhibition Flows and Traces. Publications include Swappan the Mallimacks (Galdragon Press), Nouster and Clear Day on the Black Craig, Orkney (Braga Press). She received a SAC Writers’ Bursary in 2002. In the Hanging Valley is her first full collection.

An Interview with Yvonne Gray

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

I was nine or ten when I realised I enjoyed writing. I wanted to be an author and illustrate my own books – and to be a musician. Everything seemed possible! In my teens I wrote fairly regularly, influenced by whoever I was reading at the time – Hardy or Lawrence, Keats or Eliot. Shocked to see homeless people on the streets of Edinburgh, or reports on the famine in Biafra, or the film The War Game which our history teacher showed us, I wrote poems and short stories. In my last year at school the playwright Donald Campbell did a series of creative writing workshops with us, which were eye-opening and encouraging.

I went on to study English at university but became curiously inhibited about writing. Later I concentrated on medieval literature – I remember sitting in my flat at night translating the Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood and beginning to enjoy the process, moved by its beauty and its layers of meaning. The impulse to write returned but I did it sporadically and secretly, never finishing things. Reading Henryson and Dunbar, I realised I’d grown up feeling that Scottish accents were somehow wrong – at school people got put down for using Scots words and I too had the feeling at times of being listened to with a sort of patronising tolerance. But here was Scots being gentle and reflective, expressing serious thought and a spectrum of feeling. I read modern Scottish writing too – Lewis Grassic Gibbon, MacDiarmid, MacCaig, Morgan and George Mackay Brown. I met the poet Jon Silkin in the Student Union one day – he gave me a copy of Stand, which I later read avidly. We talked about writing and he suggested sending him some work. I never did, but felt stirred by the possibility.

Living in Montrose in the eighties I discovered Marion Angus, Helen Cruickshank and Violet Jacob and wondered (finally!) who the modern Scottish women writers were. In the library I found poems by Liz Lochhead and Valerie Gillies and identified with what they wrote. When we settled in Orkney I met people who were writing, not secretly or self-consciously, but working at it, reading in public, being published – Pam Beasant, Joanna Lawson, Fiona MacInnes, John Aberdein. I began showing what I wrote to other people. The first poem I sent away won a prize; the next few were published. I obeyed the impulse to write now, finishing work and sending it off.

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

These poems have been written over the last ten years, inspired by people or places and their stories; landscapes; the work of other artists. Anything with a sort of resonance; anything experienced with intensity. If it has cohesion as a collection it’s to do with change and with what is unchanging; and with the idea that maybe nothing is changeless.

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

Writing, rewriting and listening to what I write. Paring it down and feeling for the right form. Sometimes something emerges that feels right, sounds right, and looks right. For that moment at least!

How and when do you write?

I use a B pencil and a notebook. I might sketch out an idea or note down an image or phrase, just to hold onto it. When I begin a poem I write quickly, trying to get it all down without stopping. Then I redraft it, reading aloud if I can. I revise it several times before typing it. A week later, it can seem – magically! – better than I’d thought. More often, it needs to be changed. So I work on it then leave it again. That can go on for weeks. Or years! Sometimes it’s good to have a deadline.

I write when I have an idea or project to work on, usually snatching time early in the morning when the house is quiet, or in the middle of the night if I can’t sleep. Travelling by ferry or bus can be a good time too. Out walking, I might draft something mentally then write when I get home.

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

Novels that you can inhabit for a while. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago; Willa Cather’s My Antonia or Janice Galloway’s Clara. Some non-fiction – recently Sarah Wheeler’s Terra Incognita and Maggie Fergusson’s biography of George Mackay Brown. The writing and stories of the travelling people – Betsy Whyte and Duncan Williamson. Kathleen Jamie’s poems; Robert Rendall’s nature writing and his Orkney dialect poems. Most recently Edwin Mickleburgh’s Beyond the Frozen Sea: Visions of Antarctica. And I keep coming back to the poems of film-maker Margaret Tait.

An extract from In the Hanging Valley

Glencoe Spring 1692

I was there that night
stepped knee deep in the icy river
washing clothes in the pure water.
I watched it flowing over the stones
and winding out of the glen
to the land beyond, gleaming in snow-light
that fell from shrouded mountains.

You saw me there that night
as you crouched by the icy river
scooping the dark water.
You thought you knew who I was – you started
and turned away, arm shielding
your pitcher of water as you ran, stumbling
through snow, back to the village.

I was there that night
stepped knee deep in the icy river
washing soiled clothes in the pure water,
but I could not have stopped what was coming.
I watched you hurry through spindrift
seeing you fade as it soughed and shifted
in the gathering wind.

Long before dawn the spring storm came.
Bright suns burst on frozen roofs
and sudden red flowers bloomed in snow.
I saw your clothes rent with thorns
wreathed with heavy-scented roses.
I stooped and washed them in the pure water
of the icy river that wound on out of the glen.