David Cooke’s latest poetry collection “In The Distance’, featuring my cover artwork, is the latest post on the excellent poetry blog of South African writer Michelle McGrane.
Click on this link to enjoy this and other excellent poetry features on Michelle’s superb site.
Follow this link to purchase David’s poetry collection from Amazon.
I hope you can take some time to read this thought provoking article on the Two Ravens Press website.
With the recent announcement of cuts to arts funding, many people have been made aware or the perilous financial nature of creating and promoting the arts in it’s various forms. Publishing has always been a high risk area, particularly if you are aiming at a certain audience and not following a more commercial mainstream route. The following extracts from the website gives you a flavour of what Two Ravens Press are about:
“Everything that we publish, we publish with passion. We love each of our books. They say something about the author, they say something about us, and they say something about the time and the place they were born into. Each book is a person we like being around. Because each, in its own way, fights back against formulas and homogenization, against the analgesic washing-out of colour that threatens to fade our bright thoughts.”
“We are very different from most publishers in the way that we approach publishing. We live in one of the remotest regions of the (already pretty remote) Outer Hebrides on a working croft; we spend as much time as we can outside and with our growing collection of animals. When we’re not editing or typesetting our next book, trying to get an author on the radio or packing up books from website orders and making the post-office run, we stare at the sea a lot or talk to the turkeys (they have a surprisingly large conversational repertoire). We have absolutely no desire for big-city offices and all their trappings. We don’t do glittering celebrity-studded launches, we don’t do hype and we don’t do fashion. We publish only what we want to publish and believe in, sell only in ways that we consider ethical and to outlets that we can work with, and there are some activities associated with traditional publishing models that we just don’t do. We don’t publish for big sales figures (which isn’t to say that we wouldn’t like some …), rather we publish only work that we love and that we believe really needs to be published. We believe there are already probably too many books in the world; we are increasingly selective in what we might additionally inflict on it. This doesn’t in any way mean that we’re not serious about publishing. We are small and yet we are professional: our books are fully distributed and we do our very best to get them reviewed and appropriately publicised.
And we take our books very seriously: as well as publishing new writers we also publish authors of the stature of Whitbread Prize winner Alasdair Gray, James Tait Memorial Prize winner Alice Thompson, and the late internationally acclaimed Franco-American experimental writer Raymond Federman.”
I’ve have had the good fortune to have worked with Sharon and David at Two Ravens Press, and know how committed they are to producing books that they feel will make a strong contribution to the literary fabric of the country. Their books are beautifully designed and engage their readers with innovative and thought provoking work.
Take time to read this informative and heart-felt article, and if you can, go to the website and take a look at some of the excellent titles they have on offer in their catalogue. In these hard times for the arts, we should all make the effort to support imaginative and independent ventures such as this.
Click on this link to read the article in full.
Evocative exploration of island life Small Expectations by Donald S. Murray, a Lewis man now living in Shetland, goes well beyond the wry claim of the title. From the author of the intensely evoked and researched The Guga Hunters (Birlinn, 2008), focusing on a small group of Western Islanders who hunted gannets, expectations are great, and are not disappointed. This new collection of explorations of the inner and outward Hebridean is a three-course meal for the mind, weaving stories and poetry with a shimmering sensitivity. From his deep island roots, Murray has travelled far to come full circle to this book. It’s a hymn of love and longing; of belonging and exile, and a wry, perceptive conjuring up of the individual exploring himself and straining against a particular, imposed identity. The book is beautifully produced, with striking cover artwork by Doug Robertson. It’s sensitively thought out, reading seamlessly from cover to cover, or as a ‘dipping in’ book. The mix of story and poetry is organic and satisfying – it shows off the full breadth of Murray’s talents, and the depth and musicality of his voice. Murray has a sharp eye for character and tells it as it is: the places people have in their community, the restrictions and liberations that brings about; the peculiarities, small-mindedness and generosity of the islanders. He focuses on the imaginative life, bound to the islands and his native Gaelic – ‘the ghost inside my throat’, and the fear of losing them, while the lust for travel, adventure and education pulls him ever away, glimpsing ‘the clink of far-off worlds’. There are lovely poignant stories, exposing how communities interact and how people can be forced out of their usual roles. In Valentine’s Day in the Hebrides, life is turned upside down by the arrival of a Valentine card on the door mat of every John MacLeod on the island (sent by a lost love who cannot remember her John’s address). Consternation ensues, with everyone looking at themselves, and each other, in a wary new light, and the unexpected result of encouraging a particularly bashful John MacLeod to finally declare himself to the woman he has long admired. Throughout, the central questions are prominent. What gives a sense of belonging? When do you no longer belong? How can you escape from your roots? How can you pay homage to your cross-hatched love of a place and its landscape and traditions that shaped you? The questions are posed and explored, although it is clear there are no answers, or a varying multitude of them. Clear influences are the surprising combination of Dickens, Iain Crichton Smith and Clash lead singer Joe Strummer, whose roots were in Lewis. ‘Should I stay or should I go now?’ from the Clash song, sums up the restless impetus of the book, and the capturing of those moments when your childhood home is sometimes a prison, or a lost home from which you realise you have escaped more thoroughly than you ever meant to. There’s great deal of haunting, wry sadness and wisdom in the book. ‘If things got worse, he could always live on sea-pink, heather, the sprawl and tuck of fish hooked upon the foreshore, all that was in the gift of the old world that he’d squandered and let slip.’ Small Expectations will be launched unusually in a simultaneous, virtual experience across the whole UHI campus, from Shetland to the Western Isles, including Orkney College, on Friday 26 February. The book is available from bookshops or directly from Two Ravens (www.tworavenspress.com), price £9.99.
New Shetlander Review - Small Expectations - reviewed by Morag MacInnes
Small Expectations Donald S Murray pub TRP £9.99 - £7.99 inc P&P from the TRP website (http://www.tworavenspress.com/TRP_Small_Expectations.html)
We have all done it, haven’t we, us island folk: go away, get an education, learn a new language – and then come back to find ourselves tongue tied. In Orkney, when you came back fae Sooth, they accused you of ‘chantan’. It was a disgrace, to be caught with a different lilt to your voice.
Donald Murray has clearly experienced all of this in spades. This collection is soused in longing. (I nearly said in herring, which might also work…) Longing for what’s lost. The past tense dominates.
The first thing to say about the book is that it’s beautiful. An atmospheric and germane cover by Douglas Robertson absolutely catches the drive of the language, theme and mood. Plus the paperback mimics a hardback, with a very useful bookmark – flap. I don’t think I explained that well, but hold the book and you’ll see; it’s delightfully, usefully designed, and maintains the Two Ravens Press look we are coming to recognise, yet has its own identity.
Even the choice of type echoes one of Murray’s inspirations – Dickens, in particular, of course, Great Expectations. That archetypal leaving and returning to loss and learning story – Pip’s, - been reinterpreted many times, most interestingly perhaps by Lloyd Jones. You’ll recall that Pip had to come to terms with the fact that his benefactor was not the crazy Miss Havisham, guardian of the heartless tantalising Estella; but a broken down ex con called Magwitch.
Murray too is coming to terms with an inheritance which draws him, infuriates him and makes him despair by turns. It makes him – like Pip – investigate himself and his assumptions about his past.
This man writes great prose, brave, surprising, experimental, funny. Unlike many Scots writers, he can use myth and legend without descending into bathos. His Lewis boy grows gills, becomes a peat, has golden horseshoes, drowns his parents before they can drown him – as fine a series of meditations on the confines and constraints of island life as I think I’ve come across. There’s an unruly tongue and a Russian barber with wild scissors…there’s Murray Murray, who has the gift of seduction by song, and the boy who, through love, becomes the Northern Lights.
There are bewitched gutting knives, magic porridge pots, the dirty fish mackerel served in a hundred ways., ghosts on roll on roll off ferries – there’s a colt who becomes human…anyone who has lived on islands will recognise much grounded knowledge here, of life and work and custom – and get a deal of enjoyment from Murray’s way of up ending expectation. His assurance with language, and the way he knows his landscape and folk inside out, means you don’t question that the magic transformations happen. Because he says it, it’s so.
The prose – they’re folk tales really, a handbook for the modern haunted islander – are interleaved with poetry, - and some of the poems are linking the Pip theme with larger ideas about wordlessness, loss of simplicity. Murray is a rhyme man. This is unusual and interesting. I wonder if it’s a conscious decision to do, again, with the culture he’s anatomising. Read aloud they will sound powerful, a gesture to an oral tradition that’s going. They don’t all work – who can say that of any collection – but many are profound, simple and stunning. In Songs of an Inner Émigré he describes:
‘ the sense of restlessness
that overcomes us when we see greylags graze
on a green field in a northern isle
…we envy them their trespasses, how latitudes of light
give way to flocks that follow principles of flight’
A poem about whelk gathering becomes a meditation on the impossibility of escaping responsibility.
‘it comes for us. A needle tugging life
out from where it’s hidden. It will one day find
us both within dark stillness and the turbulence of light’
This is a series of meditations to return to often. To call it a handbook of loss would be wrong; that implies that there’s nostalgia and sentiment here, and there isn’t much of that. Besides, it’s hard to ignore these things; they are part of island inheritance and have their place.
No; Murray is a thoughtful brave investigator into the power of roots to strangle or nourish. He uses every source there is – but has his own quirky take. I think I want a novel next. With a magic colt.
