Tracy Patrick is a writer and performer from Paisley. She started writing poetry in 2000 when she became a member of the Paisley Writers’ Group. She has since had poetry and prose published in Nomad, Cutting Teeth, New Writing Scotland, Southlight, The Eildon Tree, and Poetry Cornwall, as well as numerous small press magazines, anthologies, and websites, including www.laurahird.com and glasgowtosaturn.com. She was selected for the SQA anthology Write Times when her work was featured in posters on the Glasgow Underground. She was a winner in Glasgow City Council’s Freedom Poetry competition celebrating the anniversary of the release of Nelson Mandela, and she has recently completed the MLitt in Creative Writing at GlasgowUniversity.
In 2001, Tracy found herself onstage for the first time performing her work. The following year, she won the Glasgow and Edinburgh poetry slams and eventually decided that, rather than being a performance poet, she’s a poet who sometimes performs. She has since performed at various venues from Big Word, to the Wicker Man Festival in Dumfries. She has also been part of various performance groups including Chromatic Voices, and Gaelic Voices, a multi-media collaboration produced by Confab, exploring Gaelic culture in contemporary Scotland. She also enjoys writing and performing monologues. Recently, her triptych of monologues, Three Marys, was performed with Helen Cuinn and Lou Thornton at Glasgow’s West End Festival. Tracy has also been known to perform in musicals and is set to tour this year in Miss Smith, also produced by Confab.
For the past eleven years, Tracy has been founder editor of the small press environmental poetry magazine Earth Love, whose proceeds raise money for conservation causes. The magazine has had many contributions from all over the globe. During its time, Earth Love has featured the work of well-known writers such as Paisley poet Graham Fulton, Zimbabwe playwright and poet Tawona Sithole, Gaelic poet and novelist Angus Peter Campbell, and the late and fondly remembered, Edwin Morgan - who kindly donated an unpublished poem. In 2006, the magazine acquired funding for an anthology and the editor is currently seeking funding for a second anthology which was intended to celebrate ten years of the magazine but, as funding is difficult to come by these days, may end up celebrating an eleven or twelve year anniversary. To find out more, visit the Earth Love website at: www.earthlovepoetrymagazine.co.uk
Tracy has just completed her first novel, ‘The Darkness Between Stars’, a black comedy set in Glasgow and the Western Isles, in which an ambitious advertising executive accidentally kills her religiously conservative future father-in-law. If it ever gets published, she’ll ride through Paisley naked on a horse.
As a final word of warning, never ask Tracy to play the guitar. It will be the worst thing you ever do. If she picks one up, leave the room – quickly.
PS: She is one of the world’s growing number of vegans.
An early memory of a Glasgow landmark:
A EURO-VISION
The most important event
in my eight year old world
Bucks Fizz at the Glasgow Apollo.
The hall bubbled with anticipation.
Glamorous Aunt Cathy took my hand.
We crammed into the darkness,
the distant stage
obscured
by a big yellow pillar. “I can’t see.
I can’t see.”
“Ssh,” she said,
and that Euro-winning moment
where the boys whip off the girls’ long skirts
to reveal cheerleader minis
took place behind a stone column
and a thousand heads.
All I got were gasps and glimpses
when they darted off for costume changes
as if they couldn’t make their minds up what to wear.
*
And now when I get that feeling,
of the stage being small and far away
I think of Bucks Fizz at the Glasgow Apollo
as if
the big yellow pillar
has
never really moved,
and that life is all entrances
and exits and vague memories
of a blonde woman in a gold lamé bikini
that may or may not be true.
Two poems dedicated to Robert Tannahill, Paisley’s best loved bard:
CASTING CLOTH
It was spring when he was found
In a coffin vein of the Candren burn
His coat and silver watch upon the ground
The white thorn in the hedges spread their bloom
And on the braes burst stars of yellow broom
It was spring when he was found
At three am, his dreams discarded
No elegy to comfort, he departed
His coat and silver watch upon the ground
And all was gold and glistening in the sky
Above the body of this lonely boy
It was spring when he was found
Reflections on the reservoir
The lavrock singing to the poet’s altar
His coat and silver watch upon the ground
A loom full of silent thread
A wreath of words around his shy head
It was spring when he was found
His coat and silver watch upon the ground
MEMENTO
I followed his words upstream
Away from the main cursus
To a quiet culvert
Of yellow broom and weeping willow
Undisturbed by self interest
Beside the linn I heard him
Playing an old sad flute of
Forgotten rhymes, unsure
Of his own battered legacy
Folding his soul close as night
I recalled how he removed
His silver watch, placed his coat
Over the flowers, no stars
In the carry, just a bitter
Baptism for a lone sufferer
His young tongue like a milk white
Thorn that continued singing,
Opened its bashful lips,
Like the Mavis, no moralist
But nature’s torn elegist
************************************
ONLY A VOICE
in his mouth he carries
three small ghosts
they have no breath
but his
through his eyes they see
the uncluttered sky
and on his tongue they hear
the words
they had no time
to speak
tomorrow hope peace
so he has become their home
they remind him
of the unexpected tang of salt
of the trust they were
too young
to lose
he hoists their memories
on the wind
that follows him
to forgetful shores
offers them his veins
but they do not want blood
only songs and remembrance
a place they can plant
their innocence
like in the hearts
of the flowers
he stops to breathe
clasping in his arms
the spiny stalks
warm red petals pressed
to his cheek
thank god he says
and it is not only his voice
he hears
it is not
only his voice
This poem is a version of the Gaelic prayer – according to Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica - that accompanies the nightly custom of smooring of the fire. This involves spreading the embers over the hearth, creating a slight heap, or boss, in the centre, then laying three peats so each touches the boss, and covering the whole with ashes before reciting the prayer. The idea is to keep the fire lit but subdued overnight. The ritual is commonly performed by a woman.
SMOORING THE FIRE
I lay this peat
In the name of the flame
Do not let it go out
Keep it burning
This night and every night
In heart, memory, mind
Keep the fire in our bones and tongues
Its ancient song drumming in our ears
Do not let us forget
At the end of each day
We lie edge to edge
Like peats in the flame
Our common centres
Touching, surrounding
This hearth, this house
Seinnidh sinn fhathast
Seinnidh sinn fhathast
And still we sing
************************************
TOO MUCH SALT
Shore is like a muscle, self-trained to be
still, motionless, gold. It has no concept
of always. It does not think of victories
and defeats. The shore has spent a lifetime
watching the sea. The sea is blue and black
from beating hard against the rocks. It longs
to be victorious, ever trying
to engulf shore. Sea does not understand
shore’s impassivity. Sea endlessly
changes; when finished roaring it subsides.
Changeability is its permanence.
Yet sea knows it will find a shore, and shore
knows sea will always return. Each carries
the memories of the other, and too much salt.
These two poems are about the Fortinghall Yew on the banks of Loch Tay, estimated to be Europe’s oldest tree at 6000 years old. One legend states that Pontius Pilate played in the branches as a child, though this is unlikely.
YEW TREE
You didn’t ask
to be born
but here you are
in all the mystery
of your own rebirth
shedding
the heart of you
expanding outwards
life cleaving to your
fractured trunk
sculpted
by wind and
rain, the dead
in every pillar,
rooks in branches
crowing
your name –
if trees have names.
You were old
before Noah
speak
to me from
the mouths
of your leaves
teach me to wear
the rings
of endurance.
Until then
I am a child
swallowing its tongue.
FEART-NAN-GALL
(Stronghold of the Strangers)
Consider creation:
The mother seed, pale green and glacier-wet.
This anchored root,
Assailed by rain and elemental joy.
Each pithy hand
That stripped the fibrous bark and bent the bow.
The virgin fields,
Their white-knuckled circles pleading for growth.
A spark of Beltane fire
Igniting new-born chambers of the sun.
The guilty blood-stained kings
Hiding behind the white fort, Dun Geal.
A plague of bodies darkening the earth
Galar Mor
Sanctified church,
Its tombs of leaden grief stuffed with roots.
And pilgrims
Plucking relics from divinity’s toes.
I am weary.
Take your memories and go. To me, you are all strangers.
************************************
Wild within
Uncounted hours
you waited by the door.
Tufts of your ears,
two crescent moons,
squat pyramid of your body,
brimmed with patience.
At sound of my feet
pad-padding, your tail
imprinted the air
with a question,
fur bristling for sight of that
broken, plastic clothes peg
that I shoved
under the gap
to meet your paw
quick as silver.
A bridge: a bond
between wild and within,
you wove tiger stripes
between my shins;
the wearied looks from neighbours
(it’s her and that daft cat again).
Let me dream of you,
fleas and all –
the vibrato of your purr
in my ear, constellations
of wash lines above my head,
rows and rows of pegs
like twinkled stars.
And silence when I wake
- as though you simply
disappeared,
ear high through the grass.
