Foraging

Creatures

For weeks we watched a spotted flycatcher
tenant the garden like a summer guest.
We didn’t see the other birdwatcher –
grey squirrel, magpie, cat? – plunder the nest.

*

We feed the cattle pelleted necrotics
(dead animals’ dried tissue, flesh and bone),
inject them with steroids and antibiotics
to keep the creatures alive till they’re full-grown.

*

‘Coursing’s fairer than gunshot, gas or snare.’
When a greyhound grows too old, it’s killed.
But just before a pair of greyhounds tear
a hare apart, the hare cries like a child.

*

Panda, orang utan, and polar bear –
species can be at risk for a hundred years
or more before we make them disappear.
Pine marten, red squirrel, mountain hare…

*

Wild animals lead strictly ordered lives;
their freedom is a wild necessity.
House animals are like children, husbands, wives,
the kind of mindless beasts we used to be.

Published: 2009
ISBN: 978-1-905208-12-8
Pages: 184

Sounds Before Sleep

“In this poet’s work two important things are immediately apparent – a properly distanced compassion for people and almost everything which makes up the natural world, and a respect for language … In these good poems, feeling and poetic skill are always linked together, and the whole book is not only finely chiselled but a good augury for this poet’s next volume.”

Elizabeth Jennings, The Scotsman

Spheres

“Edward Thomas is the inevitable standard by which one judges nature poetry like that of James Aitchison, whose basic materials received the more reflective and psychological shaping established by Thomas. Aitchison can stand the comparison better than most.”

Edna Longley, The Irish Times

Second Nature

“poems … reaching back in their clarity and straightforward strength of feeling to the work of his earlier compatriots Edwin Muir and Norman Cameron. Even this praise does no justice to Aitchison’s individuality. ‘I Watched You Walking’ and ‘Three Poems In March’ are tender love poems, while Interlude: Heloise And Babington and Antarctica are successful attempts to make poetry do some of the things usually left to the novel these days.”

Robert Nye, The Times

Brain Scans

“Bravo, then, for those who persist in bringing out Scottish poetry. Without the Scottish Cultural Press, we’d have been denied the virtuosity of James Aitchison’s brilliant and moving Brain Scans, … technically adroit, deeply felt, and artistically mature.”

Donny O’Rourke, The Herald

“with James Aitchison, there is always a sense of an intelligent and kindly interlocutor.”

Richard Price, PN Review