Charlie Gracie’s new poetry collection coming soon!

Tales from the Dartry Mountains is on its way. Charlie Gracie’s new poetry collection will be published by Diehard in January 2020, with launch events this November.

Des Dillon on Tales from the Dartry Mountains

Charlie Gracie’s poetry set in Ireland takes you directly into the history of his family and the history of their land. The intimacy with this land now lost in those who had to leave. It’s never directly said but those who had to leave are now out of sorts and out of place in a land that just doesn’t quite fit them. The poem where his mother rides a chopper bike to work describes this out of placeness perfectly. There is a constant drone of grief for what an immigrant loses; never again to be Irish and never quite 
Scottish. And too far removed in time now anyway to ever go back and find what is lost. The political oblique-ness and visceral descriptions are what makes these poems work, no lectures, no diatribes and more philosophical insight than anger.

The second part of the collection deals mostly with Scotland (with a few trips elsewhere) and there are some crackers in here too. It seems to me that the melancholy of the emigrant from the Darty Mountains must bleed 
into whatever Gracie writes about in the here and now. The trace of melancholy and the longing for something we shall never receive resonates through the whole work. Take For betterfor instance; a tremendously truthful look at old age and tucked away, like a genius in Easterhouse, is a breathtakingly exact line that could be a whole poem itself (read it and see it). Or the T shirt for those whose loved ones have disappeared into dementia.

A masterly, honest and melancholy collection.

Des Dillon is an internationally acclaimed award winning writer, born in Coatbridge: poet, short story writer, novelist, dramatist, scriptwriter for radio and screen. 

Callander Haiku

20160310_135036Sally Evans, poet and editor at diehard, has produced a great collection of haiku whose inspiration comes from Callander and the Callander Poetry Weekend that she and husband Ian run annually. Callander Haiku is tightly packed with work from a wide range of poets from all over Scotland and beyond.

I am very pleased to say that there is a small batch from Charlie Gracie. Katrina Shepherd, one of Scotland’s best and most prolific haiku poets, features among the 39 poets, as do Elizabeth Rimmer, Colin Will and Finola Scott.

Here is one of my poems that are included. Hens feature very strongly in the Callander Poetry Weekends.

clack clack of hens

breeze through the garden

a poet speaks

The form is played around with by some of the poets and this adds to the joy of this book. Sally has a knack for picking out ideas like this and making them happen. This is a lovely production and one that I will leaf through often.