The voice from Nigh-No-Place

I'm very excited, obviously, about the Eliot award and very startled but I wouldn't have felt hard done by if it hadn't happpened.

... because writing usually demands a reader. And they're hard to come by in poetry. Or do you write for yourself?

As I said I'm going to do it anyway, and over the past few years I've found some readers - I don't feel I need lots of them. I know that I'm missing a link thinking like that, but what I've established for myself is that it doesn't help me survive emotionally to expect a readership, to expect support.

I've been lucky. I've had a number of grants. I have found an audience. And yes, I've had to do jobs that don't really suit my temperament very much that I find quite hard but I don't think that's poetry's fault. I find it hard to make the connection to expectation. Some folk just are more social and they interact more with a series of larger cultures but I feel like I just potter round my garden.

I've read you described as a "nature poet". But it seems that your poetry is as much about when humans rub up against nature - that it's human poetry as much as nature poetry?

I hope so. I think it's more a poetry of place and voice. A sense of being at home in the natural world is obviously massively important to me. The term "ecopoetics" is more relevant in a way. It's not just about people going out into the landscape and looking at it. "Oh how lovely and interesting and possibly sublime!" There's an anxiety in there as well about how it's changing and about how we make ourselves at home out there, how we impact on it. For me it comes down to being honest about the present tense that you live in and looking as accurately and intently as possible at one place.

It's a silly thing to say to any poet, but language is obviously very important in your work. 

I have a bit of anxiety about my own ability to read because I find it quite hard to sit still. At the moment I'm trying to learn to read while walking. But the flipside to that is that my appreciation of poetry is more the spoken end of things - not necessarily poetry in performance, but the stuff in books which is honest and attentive to what spoken language is. Certainly that's what lights me up. The spoken word is haphazard. It veers from the formal to the irreverent and the sophisticated to the downright childish, and I like doing that. 

It sounds like you don't feel you had a lot of choice in what sort of poetry you write - it's the way you read and the way you encounter the world.

I never looked for it, that's true. It happened by mistake during my degree. I'm not quite sure what set me off. I had thought from a young age that writing was something that I could do. But I was completely stymied by my first degree in English literature. As a subject it did not come very easily to me partly because I do find it very hard to sit down and read. So I'm not sure where this piece of luck came from. That I found this thing that I felt at home doing. I had been feeling strange for quite a few years, wondering what I was for. It was such a huge relief and exultation to find myself something.

There are a lot of animals in your work - quite often domestic animals. You're quite curious about them... 

Yes, it is a curiosity. It's not more sophisticated than that. They just intrigue me. I'm a bit of a nerd like that. I used to keep tropical fish for years and years when I should have been out making friends.

I was always intrigued by the creatures that were doing their own thing despite us. To a degree I was always looking under stones to see what was underneath them and giving my teachers presents of dead bumblebees because I thought they'd appreciate them. I can trace that back a long way, and I never quite lost it. I

One of the amazing things that happened to me the first time I came to Shetland was that suddenly the wildlife that I'd heard rumours about ever since I was small was right in your face doing its own thing and was coping just fine, more or less, with us being about. We'd go on holidays to rural places as a family and you'd go to a place where you might see otters - but you never do. I was convinced that the wildlife was never going to be findable.

As much as anything, that's what compelled me to move up here. I just couldn't bear the fact of leaving the countryside again. I thought I was going to miss out.

A lot of Nigh-No-Place is an exploration of that place; the people, the things and the culture within it. Did you move there for yourself or for the material it would provide?

At the time I moved up it was definitely 50:50. I studied in Edinburgh and then in Glasgow and I got a hell of a lot out of those places but all the time I was desperately pulled out of them. I always felt my present tense was somewhere else, like I was killing time.

People tend to see moving to somewhere as remote as Shetland a short-sighted thing to do. Traditional expectations are that there will be no work and nothing to do, but for me it started to work right away. The moment I got here. I do have to do a job that doesn't light me up sometimes, but Shetland's a massively experimental, confident, optimistic place. And obviously it's gorgeous and the quality of life and the landscape draws artists here and it's a thriving community - for me at least. I feel really supported here. And I don't feel like I have to pretend to be anyone other than myself.

There's a lot of water and wet in your poetry. Is that just because of where you are?

I think it's just where I am. I'm not in my element, funnily enough. I'm a land person. I'm not a great sea person. I have a phobia of most kinds of water, actually. But I've somehow ended up surrounding myself in it, which is daft. I am very curious about what happens on the fringes of the land though. 

Which is why you write about small rock pools so much?

Yes, that's where it's all going on for me. I'm completely fascinated by marine animals in a kind of Blue Planet way. Rock pools are a microcosm.  

You're a very unjudgmental poet, but there's this sudden angriness in "Narnia No Moose": "Alberta's a miserable monochrome..."

It's interesting because a number of people have picked up on that and it's quite unlike me. I hope not to pass judgment on a place. I just want to look at what's there. What it comes down to is I'm not really talking about the place. I went back across Canada on the train a few times. The first time I was a couple of weeks behind spring everywhere I went. "The grey grey grass of home" is more about me sitting in a one-room schoolhouse in the middle of a field in Alberta that someone very kindly leant me to stay in just trying to get writing again. I'd been trying all the way across Canada to get fluent again. That's really what it was about. A grey grey page in front of me that I couldn't get a voice to live on.

You're not obviously a political poet, but were there choices you made along the way about what your subject matter was that were in any way political?

No, I don't think so. I'm almost alarmingly apolitical, which is something I have anxiety about in the same way as I do about the reading thing. I think that I'm not political is possibly partially about the generation I come from but also to do with me as a person. I have very good, very close friends, but I'm not someone who is always out seeing people. I think to be political, I would almost need to be someone who was relating themselves to other people. For me that's something I'm learning to do very late on. 

Is there a single artwork that made you change your position on something?

I couldn't actually put my finger on something that had changed my position so much, but there were definitely a number of poets who lit me up to what I felt at home writing. The first and only time I went to a seminar on ecopoetics, I went in the space of 40 minutes from someone who was thinking I was someone who was just writing about the only thing I could, to actually thinking that ecopoetic tradition more or less summed up all of my motivation to write, and that was quite startling. And a huge relief in a way. I felt like I'd come home.

I relate that back to the earliest poetry that lit my head up – which was Edwin Morgan and Norman MacCaig. In Edwin Morgan's case it was that voracious curiosity about absolutely everything, and in Norman MacCaig's case, that massive compulsion to make himself at home in quite a small area in Sutherland. He writes again and again about the same mountains, Assynt in particular, and Suilven. He talks about them as characters, if not people. It's this love affair over years with one area. And reading that and thinking, "Oh, it's all right to do that. That's not as nerdy as I thought it was."

Is there a sense of purpose there? You're talking about people with a connection with their landscape - and that might not be as simple as it appears - but are you advocating a simplicity of engagement?

[Pause.] I'm advocating it for me! [Laughs.]

That's what I suspected.

It's an amazing experience to find out that life actually works here. You're right to identify that it's probably not as simple as it seems. I get invited to a lot of readings and it always involves that awkward moment when I have to  tell them what it costs to bring me south. You have to run a car here, and I'd rather not, but I'd rather run a car and live here than spend my life in a city. You can't take the bus here. I feel incredibly privileged living between to visible bodies of water, between the Atlantic and a voe that runs along the side of the island that I live on, and I can hop out over my back wall to the cliff tops which is amazing. But I'm within 20 minutes of the town of Lerwick. We have hospitals, we have fantastic schools, the arts development agency here is so sophisticated... it's hard to think of this as a simple place. I think it's a healthy microcosm of everything you see south.

Does winning the TS Elliot prize making writing easier, or harder?

I'm hoping it's going to make it possible. Not just financially - but feeling confirmed as a poet, that I might have a right to put my voice out there. I do feel some expectation, which alarms me slightly. The frustrating thing at the moment is that I'm working my six weeks notice at my part time job. I'm desperate to get writing, but I'm just very, very busy.

What's the job?

I work in a gallery. It's a smashing place, but I'm a kind of front of house person and I just shouldn't be allowed to do that, but I have smashing colleagues.

You use bits of Shetland dialect in the book - gimmer, doit, blashy-wadder. There's a sense of a fragile ecology there, of language evaporating and diversity being lost to English.

It's undoubtedly a fragile ecology. I hear from old folk that there are quite a number of vocabulary items that have been lost. Having said that, like Gallic, there's been this huge upswing in interest in preserving the dialect. People are aware of the vast regional differences within the dialect - even within Shetland. Even the language of one island feels tremendously rich to me. And it's variously dense for me as an incomer, but you do get your ear in.

If words represent a way of seeing the world, are we losing ways of seeing?

That is the case but I don't think that agenda is my place. It's not my dialect and it's very important to me that I stay completely honest about how those words exist in my language. They're not in my everyday speech at the moment, but what happens is that you acquire vocabulary on a temporary basis depending on who you're speaking to. It's called accommodation.

At the time when I was working on the collection I was also working in a fish factory in Scalloway and they were speaking a very broad, very rich dialect. In order for me to work there I had to be able to listen very, very carefully and take on some of those vocabulary items. It's quite a privilege to have a holiday in someone else's vocabulary. But when I stopped working there those vocabulary items slipped away again.

So if I'm going to be honest about the present tense of my experience and my language it would be dishonest not to include those words, but when I stop using them it's inappropriate for me to put them in the poems. That would be weird. [Laughs.]

You created an artwork in which you placed small messages in local churches. What was that about?

In Mexico people commission paintings on tin - personal messages usually giving thanks for a saint they perceived has helped them. I just thought this is an amazing idea. I liked the fact that they were miniatures. I set to make a set of devotional objects to series of invented patron saints for an imaginary place, sort of based on Shetland but not entirely. I'm still working on it. I wasn't completely happy with the exhibition but I want to keep on doing it. I'm painting on a large scale now in the hope that I can learn a bit more about the craft, and then I'll bring it down to miniature again when I'm a bit more confident.

It's interesting making site-specific work like that. Unlike fine artists, writers don't think about the context their work is read in very much.

Absolutely, and it's really important to me. I have been influenced by that whole concrete poetry movement - what shape the black text makes on the white space, and how you interpret that white space that might sometimes stand for a bit of wilderness.

Your words do sometimes fly eastwards off the page.

Yes, in "Burra Grace" [in which a whimbrel's "peew-t" escapes the page's grid]. I was wanting to put a single bird in a big tract of wilderness. I think that is where the crossover between visual art and poetry is really relevant to me. I just like to encourage folk to look around the word as well.

Raymond Williams wrote, "To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing." Is there any sense in which these two films are actually about making hope possible, and also is there anything in particular that you are hopeful about at the moment?

Hope is a really interesting one, because I feel like I've been without it for a little while. Which is a natural rhythm in my life, I guess. At the moment I am unusually hopeful and cheerful and optimistic and determined. I have that undefined hope as well which I don't feel the need to pin down. So I wouldn't say it was hope for anything special - apart from hoping to get that sense of fluency and being at home in my own language and my own writing again, but that's a very personal hope. It's not a general hope.