Study for Scotia Deserta
August 29th, 2010 Doug
Scotia Deserta - After the poem by Kenneth White
Study for Late August On The Coast
July 23rd, 2010 Doug
Late August On The Coast - After the poem by Kenneth White
Review of ‘Small Expectations’ - The Orcadian - Pam Beasant
April 7th, 2010 Doug 
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 of Small Expectations
March 31st, 2010 DougNew 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.
Hi-Arts Podcast Featuring Two Ravens Press
March 5th, 2010 DougDownload the Hi-Arts podcast featuring an interview with Sharon and David at Two Ravens Press.
Screen shot of Hi-Arts podcast page,
“In 2006, SHARON BLACKIE and DAVID KNOWLES set up an independent publishing company called Two Ravens Press. JIM McAUSLAN travelled to their croft on the shore of Loch Broom, just outside Ullapool, to find out about this unique venture.”
Press Coverage For The Net Mender
February 28th, 2010 Doug
Press cutting from Portsmouth News, 26th February 2010
Extract from ‘Small Expectations’
January 4th, 2010 DougOne of the highlights of 2009 for me was being involved in the cover design for Donald S. Murray’s new book, Small Expectations’. The book is now available for pre-order from the Two Ravens Press website. Copies ordered from the purchase link below (at a discounted price of £7.99) will be sent out from the 1st of February. Click on the book cover below to order your copy.
‘Small Expectations is a collection of linked short prose pieces and poetry. Digressively and figuratively, it tells the story of a character born on the Outer Hebrides, steeped in myth, history and Gaelic, who is then educated for work on the mainland. The character’s life thereafter has two poles, and Murray cleverly juxtaposes these strange attractors, bringing the power of ancient myth into the modern world with imagination and great humour.’
Praise for Small Expectations
This is an edgy, unsettling, fragmented collection of poems and prose – satires, twisted myths, darkly humorous fictions, poignant reflections on language loss – through which Donald S. Murray explores the uneasy space between Gaelic and English, between the strengths of an island community and its limitations, between the lives we have and the possible lives that escape us. It’s fine, assured writing, full of contradictions, dichotomies and ironies, and we should cherish its courage and honesty.’
– James Robertson
‘This is a very fine collection of stories and poems full of imagination and humour – the humour ranging from the hilarious to the sardonic. There is a finesse and craft to the prose and poetry which rings true to many an islander’s experience. This is a writer who has been and seen. The collection is a tour de force, a distillation, arising from a living imagination of Hebrideans’ experience at home and as émigré. The reader will never look at porridge or mackerel in quite the same way again!’
– Maoilios Caimbeul
Short extract from ‘Small Expectations’
Scenes from a Hebridean Boyhood
1
My parents fed me with so many fish that, when I was around eight, I began to grow gills. These first revealed themselves in the shape of miniature double chins forming on either side of my throat. They were the same shade of silver as much of the rest of my skin, the tiny fins that had appeared one morning to replace my hands, and the oddly shaped head with eyes peering out from the forehead that formed above my neck and shoulders. Later, I began to have trouble walking, tumbling each day under the weight of scales. Mum and Dad grew alarmed at this and decided to starve me, in an attempt to restore me to my normal size and shape. However, their diet went too far. I became a sprat, a sliver of fish, not much larger than plankton. My parents looked at me with dejection and dismay. Eventually, they decided that there was nothing for it but to use me as bait. They thrust a tiny steel hook down my throat and cast a long, nylon line far and deep into the ocean, hoping that I might bring more worthwhile spawn to shore.
2
It was when I reached the age of ten that my parents decided I was such an embarrassment to them that there was little alternative but to hide me in a peatbank. I remember watching them as they stripped away a patch of turf from the moorland, digging through heather with the sharp blade of a spade. Later, they both grinned as they cut deep into moist, dark peat, working till they laid bare the layer of rock and stone hidden by its depths. They lifted me then, lowering me into the great and empty hollow they had made. ‘You’ll be alright,’ they kept saying as they packed me in its chill and black decay, burying me below its surface. ‘You’ll be alright.’ I lay there till the following summer when they took me out again, drying the peat which had crusted around my flesh. After they had turned me round a few times, ensuring that every inch of my body had been burnished brown by the sun, they hoisted me on their shoulders and carried me home. It was there that they performed the final act of my existence – tossing me on the household fire.
3
I realised how much my parents cared the day they kept urging me to rest instead of helping them, sparing me from all the hard effort of trying to scratch some pathetic excuse for life from the thin soil on our croft. ‘Go and lie on the beach,’ they said, shaking their heads when I suggested I should join them. I was still resting there some four hours later when the tide rolled in, washing all around me a vast counterpane of kelp that wrapped around my flesh and bones, binding me to the foreshore. Later, the sea began to rumble, pounding my skull, cracking my limbs, transforming my long curly hair into fronds of dabblelock, my arms and hands into oarweed, my legs into brown stipes of cuvie. A jewel of anemone became fixed to my chest where my heart had been; bladderwrack trailed around my groin. And when all that happened, my mother and father gathered their broken son on their backs and carried me to the field that had defeated all their strength and labour, casting all that remained of my once strong and youthful body onto the field they had ploughed and dug over, preparing my corpse to fertilise their land.
4
My parents were delighted the morning I began to possess hooves. They took me down to the village blacksmith, providing me with the first gift I ever received from them: a pair of golden horseshoes. ‘Run,’ they told me. ‘Show me how quickly you can race.’ And they boasted of my speed to their neighbours, sent me on errands across the moor to warn the people who lived there of thunderstorms or strong tides that had affected our side of the island. Eventually I grew tired of this, and headed in the direction of a sea-loch a mile or two away. I concealed myself in its depths, allowing the water to roll over my mane, waves to tumble across my flanks. I hid there for years, only emerging when the local miller came to the loch-shore, asking for help to turn the mill-wheel that he owned. It might have been his loose talk that brought my parents to the loch. They called my name aloud as they stood on its banks. After a while, I decided to answer them, stirring the dust of the earth as I towered above their heads. ‘How handsome you are,’ they declared. ‘Will you give us a ride on your back?’ I did as I was told, going faster when they urged me to do so, slowing down, too, when their heels dug into my flesh. And so I went on for hours, racing across the moor like they had asked me to do in my youth, my hooves thundering, tail flashing back and forth. Eventually, I decided I had done it long enough. I turned in the direction of the loch and drowned my parents in its depths.
Extract published by kind permission of Two Ravens Press
Online Catalogue - A Work In Progress
November 7th, 2009 Doug
Recently I have working on some ideas for producing an online catalogue
for the exhibitions at Bedales Arts and the Scottish Poetry Library in 2010.
Being an old-fashioned ‘pencil and paper’ type of artist, working with various software programs is proving
to be a very big learning curve! Click on the link below to see the latest work in progress.
Small Expectation - Final Cover Design
November 4th, 2009 Doug
Studio proof for the cover of ‘Small Expectations’
The finished art work has arrived for the cover of Donald Murray’s superb new book, ‘Small Expectations’, and I think the box constructions work well in the design.
It was a fantastic opportunity given to me by Sharon Blackie and David Knowles at Two Ravens Press, to produce images to compliment the text. I have worked in collaboration with Donald previously, and I find his writing a treasure trove of images and ideas, just waiting to be created visually. Doing the cover work for Small Expectations was no exception to this rule.
The book is to be published on 1st March 2010, and I would highly recommend getting a copy to read for yourself.
The book will be available from the Two Ravens Press website; click on the image to access the 2010 catalogue featuring this and many other fine titles.
Thanks also to Bob Aylott for his expertise and assistance photographing the assemblages.
