Quines by Gerda Stevenson sampler

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Special thanks to Anna Wiraszka for her beautiful frontispiece illustration and to Creative Scotland for their support towards researching this collection. I wish to express my admiration and grateful thanks to the women who have responded creatively to the first edition of Quines: Scottish artist Helen Flockhart, who painted her hauntingly beautiful work Lover’s Eye, after hearing me read my poem ‘The Abdication of Mary Queen of Scots’. Helen included Lover’s Eye in her exhibition Linger Awhile, inspired by the life of Mary Queen of Scots, and she has kindly given permission for this painting to be the cover image for the second edition of Quines; also to the members of edge: Textile Artists Scotland, who have created an ambitious touring exhibition of textile panels, inspired by forty poems from Quines, opening on International Women’s Day, 2020. 14
Preface to the Second Edition we often learn about the deceased too late. When the first edition of Quines was about to be sent off to the printer in January 2018, I attended the funeral of Scottish academic, Elizabeth Meehan. I knew that she and I had attended the same primary and high schools, although at different times. Her father was an Irish upholster, who renovated the chairs in my parents’ house. Her Scottish mother was a woman of many parts, who served as a nurse in the vad during ww11, and, years later, ran a youth club for deprived children in Edinburgh. I have a vivid early childhood memory of sitting at a long table one bright summer day in the Meehan’s garden, where Elizabeth’s mother made a bob or two by serving high teas for local farmers and passers-by. The white table cloth rippled in the breeze, the Pentland Hills stretching out before me as I sipped, for the first time, home-made lemonade. I had become aware that Elizabeth was an important academic, but hadn’t realized until she died that she was the first female professor of politics on the island of Ireland, author of a significant body of highly influential work, with a dazzling string of prestigious posts and accolades to her name. Her book Women’s Rights at Work: Campaigns and Policy in Britain and the United States (1985), was particularly influential in bringing the study of equal opportunities to international attention. The Irish Times revealed in her obituary: Meehan was the quintessential scholar, with a deep and abiding interest in citizenship, the European Union, equal opportunities and gender equality… she argued persuasively for a new conception of citizenship flowing from eu membership. She saw this new citizenship being tied to a shared moral order and not to the traditional nation state. 15
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Page 4 and 5: By the same author: Poetry If This
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Page 10 and 11: Isabella MacDuff, Countess of Bucha
Page 12 and 13: In Her Ninety-Second Year Mary Some
Page 14 and 15: Epilogue: In Memoriam Catriona Whit
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Quines by Gerda Stevenson sampler

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