If This Were Real by Gerda Stevenson sampler

Gerda Stevenson is an award-winning writer, actor, singersongwriter,
theatre and film director. She has worked on stage,
television, radio, film and in opera, throughout the UK and
abroad, and is a recipient of Scottish Arts Council and Creative
Scotland writers’ bursaries. Her writing is studied through the
Open University and the University of Glasgow’s Contemporary
Scottish Literature course. Her stage play, Federer Versus Murray,
directed and performed by the author, toured to New York
(sponsored by the Scottish Government), and was published there
by Salmagundi. She has written extensively for radio, including
original plays and dramatisations of classic Scottish novels. Her
published work includes three poetry collections, two of which
have been translated into Italian, published in Rome, two short
story collections, as well as poetry and image collaborations with
award-winning landscape photographer, Allan Wright, and artist
Christian Small.
Poetry commissions include for the Edinburgh International
Book Festival, National Museum of Scotland, Glasgow School
of Art Choir, and the University of Edinburgh. In 2014 she was
nominated as Scots Singer of the Year for the MG Alba Scots Trad
Music Awards, following the launch of an album of her own
songs Night Touches Day. She directed a film of George Mackay
Brown’s play The Storm Watchers for the St Magnus International
Festival, 2021, and wrote and directed Paper Portraits, a film
about the paper makers of Penicuik, commissioned by the
Penicuik Community Arts Association, 2025.
She was nominated for the New York League of Professional
Theatre Women’s Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award,
recognising exceptional work by non-US theatre women, and
has served as a trustee of the Scottish International Education
Trust.An acclaimed performer, she played the title role in Edwin
Morgan’s Phaedra (a Scots translation of Racine’s Phèdre) at the
Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, won a BAFTA Best Film Actress award
for her role in Margaret Tait’s feature film Blue Black Permanent,
and is the founder of Stellar Quines, Scotland’s leading women’s
theatre company.

By the same author:
Short Stories
Letting Go: A Timeline of Tales (Luath Press, 2021)
Cat Wumman: Tales o Nine Lives (Luath Press, 2025)
Poetry
Tomorrow’s Feast (Luath Press, 2023)
Quines: Poems in Tribute to Women of Scotland (Luath Press,
1st edition, 2018, 2nd edition 2020)
Quines: tributo poetico a donne della Scozia/Quines: Poems in
Tribute to Women of Scotland (Edizioni Ensemble, Rome, 2021)
Edinburgh (Allan Wright Photographic, 2019)
Inside & Out: The Art of Christian Small, with a biographical
introduction and poems by Gerda Stevenson (Lyne Press, 2018,
Scotland Street Press, 2019)
Se Questo Fosse Vero/If This Were Real (Edizioni Ensemble, Rome,
2017)
Plays for stage
Federer Versus Murray (Salmagundi, USA, 2012)
Pentlands at War, a community play, co-written with the Pentlands
Writers’ Group (Scottish Borders Council Library Services, 2006)
Plays for BBC radio
Room for Refugees (2017)
A Day Off (2015)
Homeless (2013)
Secrets (2011)
The Apple Tree (2011)
Island Blue, co-written with Iain Finlay Macleod (2007)
For children
The Candlemaker and Other Stories, illustrated by the author
(Kahn & Averill, 1987)

If This Were Real
GERDA STEVENSON

First published by Smokestack Books, 2013
This edition 2025
isbn: 978-1-804252-43-7
The author’s right to be identified as author of this book
under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
has been asserted.
The paper used in this book is recyclable. It is made from
low-chlorine pulps produced in a low-energy,
low-emission manner from renewable forests.
Printed and bound by
Robertson Printers, Forfar
Typeset in 10.5 point Sabon by
Main Point Books, Edinburgh
© Gerda Stevenson 2013, 2025

for Aonghas, Rob and Galina,
and my parents,
always remembering Marsali.

Contents
Foreword by Professor Ugo Fracassa 11
Prelude
Storm at Carlin’s Loup Rock 17
Part I: Eden
Eden 21
Snowberries 22
Butterflies 23
Maggie Mowbray 24
Head Master, Primary School 26
My Father’s Chair 27
Linton Power Cut 28
Great Aunt Anne 29
The Catwalk 31
The Red Cardigan 32
First Love 33
Part II: That Time Again
Co-op Funeral Parlour 37
Two Horses against a Hill 38
Syndrome 39
Gardening with Galina 40
The Lull 41
Child in the Woods 42
Picking Chanterelles 43
7

Gerda Stevenson
The Visit 44
Passing Through 45
Rob’s Rap 46
Fiddler’s Delight 48
Your First Visit to Church 50
My Son Stepping Out 51
How to Tell Him 52
Autumn Night 53
At Cille Choirill Church 54
My Father’s Window 55
Birch Trees 56
Year in, Year out 57
Time and Space 58
Edinburgh Waverley 59
That Time Again 60
Wedding Anniversary 61
Father-minding 62
Shirt 63
Part III: Reading the Tree
Wartime Skipping Rhyme 67
Homework for Evacuee Day 69
View from a Plane 70
Reading the Tree 71
Last Bus Ride in July 73
Sarajevo Roses 75
Ballad of the Sadr Carpenter 77
8

If this were real
Girl in the News 78
Saint Catherine 79
Santa María La Real 80
Night Meeting 82
Christmas Market 84
L’église Saint Michel 85
Asylum Seeker 86
I am the Esperance 88
Part IV: Beyond Fairliehope
Fair Wind 91
Nests 92
Volcano in April 93
Heron 94
Kissing 95
Catterline in Winter 96
Director in Rehearsal 97
To an Old Clown 98
Last Sunday 99
The Honey Man 100
Fim 101
Planting Honeysuckle 102
Ballad of the Female Watchmaker 103
Beyond Fairliehope 104
Acknowledgements 107
9

Foreword
Autobiography and visual imagination
in Gerda Stevenson’s poems
The first reviews of Gerda Stevenson’s poetry collection If
This Were Real highlighted the extraordinary musicality of
her lines and the natural scenic and performative inclination
of her writing. The reaction in her homeland after the release
of this, her first collection, was echoed in the Italian response
to its publication by Edizioni Ensemble (translation – entitled
Se Questo Fosse Vero – the felicitous work of Laura Maniero).
Stevenson’s lines, besides Scots and Gaelic sounds, and
images of the Scottish cultural landscape – among them
we find a tribute to Stevenson (Robert Louis), for example,
in the character of Leerie the Lamplighter, from A Child’s
Garden of Verses – evoke, describe and also produce images
which are not exclusively rooted in the Scottish Lowlands.
In the poem ‘Catterline in Winter’, which takes its title
from a 1963 painting by Joan Eardley, we can find a real
ekphrastic exercise. The picture is described in every detail
with the juxtaposition of a narrative hypothesis, ‘perhaps
they’re asleep – a widow /or lovers behind a blue door’. In the
minute description, in a disheartening, monotonous context –
‘under a bullet-grey sky’ – there is a splash of colour – ‘a well
of yellow laughter’. This is indeed a characteristic element of
Stevenson’s poetic relevance.
In ‘Reading the Tree’ – the poem which gives the title
11

Gerda Stevenson
to the third and most weighty section of the book where
the author expands the boundaries of her gaze to a broader
geopolitical panorama, which includes Bosnia, Iraq, Syria –
we find a reference to the snapshot of a Bosnian photographer,
an image certainly different from the Scottish context: Tuzla,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Balkan wars. Starting from that
photo, taken in 1995 by Darko Bandic, depicting the body
of a woman – whose name, as we can read in the epigraph,
is Ferida Osmanovic – hanging from a tree, the poet, through
an immediate association, dictated by visual memory, takes
a leap – and we, with her – back in time. This iconographic
ascent is supported here by an intertextual dialogue. In the
final lines we read in fact ‘the strange fruit he is about to
frame’ (my emphasis), and the thought immediately goes to
the song made famous by Billie Holiday. Also in that case the
song originates from a photograph of a hanging driven by
racism. (The photos of the lynching taken by Lawrence Beitler
inspired Abel Meeropol to write the text of the song.)
Marco Fazzini, who wrote the Introduction to the
Italian edition of If This Were Real, refers to the poems
in the book as ‘poetry in a state of grace’. But what is
this grace then, if not that of the inherent musicality
of the text? To try to give an answer to the question,
I would say that in Stevenson’s writing, the tragedy, the gravity
of life – private (distressing family bereavements give life to some
poems) or public (the historical tragedy of the wars of the past
and of the present century) – is never dissociated from the
levity of the present, of what brightens and colours our days.
An example of this is ‘Butterflies’, the poem dedicated to
Goran Simić – a witness to the siege of Sarajevo, ‘the war-torn
poet, /corpses hanging from his every line’ – which associates
the victims of war to the polychromy of delicate butterflies:
12

If this were real
[…] naked bodies
piled high in a ditch […]
birch woods nearby, bright flecks
among the branches that might,
I thought, be butterflies.
There are other numerous examples of places where we can
find once again an epiphany of colour against a monochromatic
grey or milky white background. In ‘Linton Power Cut’, for
instance, a truck slides and tumbles in the snow scattering its
load of oranges, ‘gowd frae Seville in the snaw!’. The poem
The Catwalk tells about girls who tripped and fell in a gorge
whose banks are covered with forget-me-nots the same colour
as their eyes. In ‘The Red Cardigan’ the mournful tone of the
piece written in remembrance of the mother overlaps the red
of a knitted sweater (a ‘red cardigan’ colours the description
of another mother who hanged herself after witnessing the
massacre of Srebrenica in the above mentioned poem ‘Reading
the Tree’). Finally, but the list could be longer, ‘How to Tell
Him’, one of the most remarkable pieces of the collection,
masterfully develops from a narrative device. In the poem, the
protagonist has just received a phone call telling her about the
death of her mother-in-law. She will have to report the news
to her husband who is sitting right in front of her. Until that
moment, for the unsuspecting son, her mother is alive, sending
fresh eggs from her croft, ‘scooping salt herring from a plastic
pail, /their scaled bellies a rainbow in her palm – /until I tell
him’ (my emphasis).
Taking the cue from an image of the author, I would
say that in the pages, poetry moves like a robin on a litter
bin (‘A robin flits onto a litter bin’, from the poem ‘Last
Sunday’). What counts, however, is that that splash of colour
is not merely decorative. The author seems to remind us that
poetry is neither ancillary nor an intruder among the horrors
13

Gerda Stevenson
of reality, since its lightness is itself part of reality: that part
which makes it bearable and which graces us. Thanks to a
focused use of colour and light, in grey, mournful descriptive
and metaphorical contexts, the poems bring to the fore the
co-existence of lightness and gravity, tragedy and idyll, horror
and serenity in this world. Gerda Stevenson’s poetry invites
each of us to chase those butterflies, even if it is through a
confusing mass of dead bodies. Right in the final lines, which
close the book, the author urges the reader to enjoy, with her,
‘the glow of the year’s last spark’.
It is no coincidence, in fact, that the collection – maybe too
hastily defined in its initial publication as an autobiography
in verse, despite the implicit warning in the title: If This Were
Real – ends in a last bright epiphany, an extreme moment of
grace ‘Still a fillet of sunlight on the brow above, /my goal to
be splashed by those rays;/ […] I climb the brae […], reach
the ridge, /and stand in the glow/ of the year’s last spark’. The
collection, far from being merely confessional, develops indeed
around a consciously built macro-textual structure. The last
poem comes full circle with the first, ‘Storm at Carlin’s Loup
Rock’. In it, the female character is again portrayed as standing,
yet this time at the crack of dawn, waiting for a bus, under
hostile weather conditions: ‘I stand like a stone, /let sky, wind
and rain press /the weight of their season /into my skin.’
Once the reader closes the book, s/he will bring with him/
her that image of a vertical woman – in Spanish they would
say hombre vertical – who is devoted to art, to her private life
and to civic engagement, well beyond the regional borders of
an autobiography.
Professor Ugo Fracassa
Roma Tre University
14

Prelude

If this were real
Storm at Carlin’s Loup Rock
Winter’s black hand
whips my hair
into a sudden tree.
‘Dance or die!’
skirl the real ones,
and my feet itch
down the path
to the early bus.
‘Night Speed’ glares
a bulb-spangled truck
and is gone.
I stand like a stone,
let sky, wind and rain press
the weight of their season
into my skin.
No sign of my bus yet,
but Cutty Sark’s in the air,
her breath on my neck.
Rather than travel,
I’d fling her my hand,
sink time in a whirlpool
and Strip the Willow
round Carlin’s Loup.
Carlin’s Loup, in folk etymology, means Witch’s Leap
17

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