Northwords Now

appear and vanish depending on the light
and landscape behind. Sometimes the words
hang in the clouds, sometimes against stone
walls. Glimpsed singly or in small groups they
make sense of the context: ‘etched’, ‘work and
weather’, ‘distant lives’.
Nature and the elements edit the pieces.
Wind has drifted twigs across some of Kenneth
Steven’s words. Rain-wet stone is sometimes
harder to read. Or easier. Next to the waterlily
lochan at the highest point of the walk,
and under the crag where the hill ground is
starting to purple with ling, Morgan Downie’s
poem ‘Casting’ invokes geese, buzzards,
wagtails, grouse. Its fine timber ‘page’ has been
amended. Two long white lines of bird shit
run down across the words.
At present the walk comprises 32 poems
by 19 poets, some locally-based, most known
Scotland-wide, and many of them poets of the
rural with an affinity to the land. Some of the
poems or lines were selected by Jon Plunkett
for particular locations. Some poets visited
the site and responded to a chosen corner.
The creativity that’s gone into the installations
themselves, and into their positioning, adds to
the playful nature of the whole experience.
A poem by Tim Turnbull looks east across
a dyke to fields sloping steeply towards Craig
Laggan, and refers to a ‘gateway to another
world’. A few paces on, with that line still
echoing, I find it incarnate in a cast-iron gate
opening onto the same view.
‘When I said you should/grab the bull by
the horns/I thought you would understand’.
A snort and scuffle interrupt this reading of
Jon Plunkett’s poem ‘Lost in Translation’. A
bullock stands just beyond the wall ahead,
nose raised towards me.
Dropping down on a winding path between
mature birch trees, thickets of bracken and
foxglove, I’m wondering what will come
next, when Margaret Gillies Brown’s ‘The
Inner Citadel’ arrives in the centre of the
path, with its journey ‘into the dark interior/
down, down, down’.
An iteration begins; poem with poem,
poem against setting; chimes and rhymes. I’m
now aware of walking a three-dimensional
anthology.
Down through a mossy corridor between
rhododendron; down to the river, with the
rain on again, closed in by dark and drip, fern
and moss, and the river’s gurgle, there’s a place
to sit and have a fire and a feeling of an end
approaching. It’s here that John Glenday’s
poem ‘The River’ provides the emotional crux
of this anthology for me, with its resistance to
endings, and a possibility of ‘the river never
quite reaching the sea’. The Braan swings
around a bend making a deep pool that’s
prickled by rain, then slicked by brief sun. It
tumbles away over stone towards the Tay and
thus to the sea, as if in contradiction. I stand
there for some time, shake off a shiver not
only brought about by the chill, then climb
back towards the start of the walk, closing the
circle.
After a sandwich the sun comes out and
I can’t help starting the walk again, the same
impulse as returning to the first pages of a
book after a satisfying resolution. I discover
a poem I missed the first time and things
look slightly different. Under sunlight the
patchwork of grouse moor on the hills is
revealed more starkly, the purpling spread of
ling is more pronounced.
This slow walk syncopated with poem
‘stations’ will be different and bring a new
pleasure each time I visit. I’m going to enjoy
the editing style of different seasons: Autumn’s
cut determined by the fall of leaves; winter’s by
snow; spring’s by the distracting scent of wild
garlic down on the flood-eaten river banks.
Or I’ll come at different times of day; creep
up on Sally Evans’ log pile at dawn when the
words will be lit from the east. Sometimes
there’ll be shouting, sometimes silence.
I leave Corbenic with a spring in my step
(or on my pedals) as if now, with my poetryexpanded
heart and lungs full of fresh air,
I feel gloriously free to stand in a field and
shout. n
Visitors are welcome. The path starts
from a small car-park near the village
of Trochry on the A822 Dunkeld - Crieff
Road. Satnav users: PH8 0DY
www.corbenicpoetrypath.com/
Northwords Now Issue 30, Autumn 2015 17