Critically acclaimed novelist Rodge Glass gives us an extract from Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography, published by Bloomsbury in September 2008. There is also an interview with Rodge in this month's issue.

A SECRETARY DOES HIS DUTY
A Short Poem About Junk E-Mail Accounts, and the Problems of Introducing Ageing Artists to the Subtleties of the Form

Alasdair!
Don't look!
What? he says. What is it? Show Me!
I click, to messages from
Viagratastic; Nikkicam;
WecanmakeyouthreeinchesbiggerbyChristmas.
The great man stands, paces, pouts, points skyward
(He replies to all his mail)
says, Take dictation!

"Dear Sir or Madam,
You will do no such thing.
Yours Truly."

UFO
by
e.g. Jönsson

"There was a Ufo at the stables where I used to ride. He was the Scary Horse: big and black, with that bright wound of a blaze down his face. He was inscrutable. There was a gleam of madness to his black-hole eyes and his strong teeth grabbed your behind when you bent to scrape his hooves. Powerful, rounded hind legs that would have kicked you, hard, fast, if his box had been any bigger. Once he had been a stallion, but he was nipped in the bud, as stallions are when they’re destined for little girls’ riding-stables..."

 

ARCHIVED ARTICLES

Empty Bottles Dexter Petley

The Bed Angela Morgan Cutler

The Comedy of Fleck
Alasdair Gray

Marlene Regi Claire

Mortmain David Knowles

New poems Maggie Sawkins

An extract from Europa
Tom Lappin

Bog Dexter Petley

Kiribati Nights Clio Gray

Mountain Masala Mandy Haggith

The Intelligence of Hearts
Cynthia Rogerson

Two Poems Dorothy Baird

 

Three poems
by
Graeme Morgan

The Cailleach

Stark face of north gales,
Matted seaweed braids
Hang on stony cheeks....

Reverend McKinley's Dilemma
by
Alison Napier

"Ach, away. Away with your gawping, away with you now and leave me be. Can you not hear the keeper with his buckets full of slippery vegetable matter, the crockery and cutlery shaking with fear, far away, rattling through the valleys and rolling across the plains, whooshing through stations, creeping across viaducts, crawling up to the platform to make an embarrassed acceptance speech, and I would like to thank, oh, everyone, and everyone who knows me..."