photo courtesy of Malcolm Handoll of Five Senses http://www.allfivesenses.com.  Wade's Bridge, Sma Glen. sure to be back there in 2012.

Here's to 2012, a year I have regarded as the impossibe future for as long as it has been the expiry date of my driving license! This year although I have accounts for Twitter, Linkedin and Google Plus, it has transpired that facebook for all its changes and developments, is my favourite internet haunt from day to day. Join me there if you wish by clicking the facebook badge above left. If I dont know you add a wee message.
   My Blogthology takes the form of a Blogview this year, but it's still on the Blogthology page.



Enjoy a look at Pamela North's photography, including her feature 57 degrees north, which includes some of my landscape poems.


Click here for New Linear Perspectvies interview with me and Andrew F Giles, November 2011, in which I talk about Poetry Scotland, The Bees and the bookshop.

Earlier An interview with Sally by Ryan Van Winkle, May 2010. Mostly about Poetry Scotland, and also the Callander Poetry Weekend which takes place each September. The Poetry Weekend has a page of its own on this site.

New: Many of my earlier published poems are now posted on the Poemhunter website and more will follow.  It is great to be able to gather poems from disparate sources into one convenient place. Please read some of  my Poemhunter poems here   (you are welcome to leave comments in the comment boxes too) while for magazines see this one!
For info about my various books, please see left menu, and for a quick look at pics of the books, see this album

while for a less than complete list of books (main page) and translations and pamphlets see 

http://www.scottishbooktrust.com/contacts/sally-evans

and see some of my poetry reviews in the Stirling Observer   on this page.


we've got something for you
Hear me sing!



Light pillar            photo Pat Morrissey

Swirled colour
no prentice pillar
in cool interior

plain smooth stone
the artist sun
and new stained glass

congregation absent
cushioned chairs
mind their history

oaken furniture
Knox's pulpit
ecclesiastical

decoration
poverty riches
dearth of images

among these colours
someone prepares
flowers on a table

we walk round
the familiar
unfamiliar

(Dunfermline Abbey)
(Durham Cathedral)
Stirling parish church

all their trammels
of power and art
stone more than words

changeable windows,
glass and sunlight,
slabs and weather

illuminated
in an instant
around a curve.


Sally Evans


 ////////////////////////////////////////

Bookselling announcement


 I hope that one day, reader, you will come to Callander, Scotland and visit our lovely bookshop.

Our subjects include Scottish, poetry, literature, philosophy, history, Latin, Greek, natural history and gardening and that wonderful category RANDOM.

You can be sure of excellent condition and exact descriptions of any books I offer for sale.

  All friends will be able to use the site exactly as before, for its poems and news, bees and gardens, its personal element and some additional pages accessible from the Poetry Scotland website. Just skip over any booklists you stumble on, or read them for fun.

 I have added a Visitors Book and I would be very glad to see old and new users sign there.

////////////////////////////////////////

Bee video clips

the start of a new collection of fascinating bee data


The decade's turn was marked by prolonged white-out, see Lake of Menteith above, and see the Curling episode on *start here blog.*  Other things that happened a long time ago, in 2009, see below

*Viewing Tower, Flanders Moss: two great pictures to start the new diehard poetry news page

*Welsh, Gaelic and poetry in Snowdonia: SNAP to the Guardian (I blogged this 30 Nov, they blogged same pic with a poetry item 1 Dec.) see start here blog.

 

*Rachel and Star in Poland on this week page

*Gatehouse of Fleet & poem for Adrian Mitchell 
*Liverpool trip: this week page   *Deer ticks: garden page

 

*Bho Leabhar Latha Maria Malibran

*Callander Poetry Weekend 09 Gallery and account left menu

*Which science fiction writer made Loch Katrine disappear?
    *start here* blog

Poetry Scotland now at Issue   62      Link to Colin Will's  PS Website

Blaeberries

Let's go pick blaeberries,
strong, dark, sweet blaeberries

that lie in lairs
as though they know
the country's dangerous.

They hide dark wine-blue hue
among mild red-green leaves
on slopes that stalk the sun.

Let's stay an hour or so,
pretend we live like this
always, provisioning

this fruit we breakfast on,
freeze down, consume as pies,
juice thickened by heat,

sweetened with honey. High
on high braes in July,
blaeberries, earthy.

Let's go pick blaeberries
Let's go seek, let's go early.

Let's go pick blaeberries
Beth Junor took this pic of our favourite Trossachs dining room and stopping off point. Ben A'an behind. Has to be a favourite pic. It's not even so much the photography as the place feeling like part of our living space. The Blaeberries poem appeared in The Great North Road.

Callander Poetry Weekend 2009  -- now with its own page see left menu.

 

Itinerant Poetry Librarian.
Continuously since May 2006 The Itinerant Poetry Librarian has been travelling the world with a free public library, installing the library & librarian and archiving the sounds, poems and poetry of the cities, peoples and countries she meets.

We’ve now clocked up over 1000 hours of public library service, in 11 countries & 21 cities worldwide, in over 150 different locations.

We’re here to ...

    * Remind people of the importance of free public libraries
    * Subvert mainstream channels of distribution
    * Remind people that access to knowledge should be free and not dependent upon economic wealth hierarchies
    * Show people that poetry/art can provide answers to questions we ask of life
    * Experiment in existing outside of 'the market' – thereby, instead, investing in social capital, social innovation and community.

Incidental FAQs...

    * Yes we carry our entire life and the library with us as we go
    * Yes, it is quite heavy
    * No, we're not mad. As the former US Poet Laureate, Charles Simic, once said, 'But what if poets are not crazy?' That's the spirit boyo!
    * In the US we operated our entire life and library on a budget of 4 US dollars per day
    * In East Germany in 2009 we achieved our personal budgetary best record: operating life & library on a budget of one euro per day
    * We operate under official regulations, guidance policies and with core purposes, designated as the movement GYMENDECOLOGY, and also known within peripheral circles as The Zen of the Library.
    * Our Library ByeByeLaws are based on Norfolk County Council's Public Libraries ByeLaws, in turn regulated under the original UK 1964 Libraries & Museums Act. Have we adapted them for our own purposes? Yes we have. Do we mean funny business? Yes we do.
Poetry Site Links (1)  Byron's Bedroom


                          (2)  Virtual Tour of Shakespeare & Co

                          (3)  Hill Ornithological Collection

                          (4)   Recording of Yeats reading The Lake Isle of Innisfree

 

Broken Holmes and After  see my blog  

Ancient woodlands and trees

This Week page comes back to life with Doune Castle pictures

Portrait gallery: Women Makars of Scotland: Please scroll down



          (to get one contact Sally see foot of page)

 
Real bees arrive

Bees settle

Elephant painting: video on The Bees the Book page

Clock Tower and Eucryphia, Cambo house

Click for:  Sestinas  Gaarrye   Jokey Speech  Cambo   Steampunk
Goosanders
Kilmartin

New Topics Blog attached to site: (enables blog feeds to facebook.)
Women Makars and Laureates

-------Above, L-R Sheena Blackhall, Magi Gibson. Centre, Margaret Gillies Brown, all of whom by chance plan to be at Callander Poetry Weekend this year...

Hi Sally - couldnt resist a peek at Byron's bedroom, which inspired the following:

Fallen Lucifers

We love our fallen Lucifers..
Lord Byron, Errol Flynn
With their fires forever burning
And their morals in the bin

They're so like an Xmas pudding
With the sixpences stuffed in
They're rich and mad and bad for us,
There's nought so sweet as sin!

                             Sheena Blackhall , Boxing Day


NEW:  "The apostrophe is disappearing and will disappear altogether by the end of the century," said Dr Treharne. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1055772.stm


desktopsallye is still entirely semi-colon free.You will also notice an absence of apostrophes in well known elided words, in cases where there is no ambiguity. I never had an its/it's problem, but if you still use its/it's, here is why youre a duffer if you cant do it:
a) his hers its. b) it's = it is every time, except when it's = it has.


Contact me: If you like it, hate it, want to make comments or suggestions, get hold of my books, enquire about the bookshop or just say hello, you can contact me as follows:

email: sally dot king4 at btinternet dot com

phone UK [0]1877 339449

sallyevanz on facebook, Twitter and Skype, and Sally Evans on poemhunter.com

Kings Bookshop, 91-93 Main Street, Callander Scotland FK17  8BQ

Blog comment facility on *start here* blog, left menu.