Can you sum up Edinburgh in verse?

Published on Wednesday 23 April 2008 10:22

Her reign as Makar is almost over but Valerie Gillies has found a new source of inspiration.

POET Valerie Gillies has a thing about wells. For weeks at a time, she traipses the length and breadth of Scotland in search of new springs to explore – and record the sound of their bubbling water.

So far she has visited more than 120 – including several in Ireland – and she is determined to notch up more.

Dictaphone in hand, Edinburgh's Makar, or poet laureate, must cut an eccentric figure to the tourists and hill-walkers she bumps into on her wanders.

&#149 Send us your poems: Do you have a way with words? Can you sum up Edinburgh in verse? We're looking for poems which sum up the spirit of the Capital. Send yours to Edinburgh in Verse, the features desk, Edinburgh Evening News, EH8 8AS, email [e-mail], marking the subject field Edinburgh in Verse, or just post them on the comment board below.

"Sometimes my husband or my friends will come with me because wells are very sociable places," says Valerie, smiling, in her defence. "I've made new friends going round wells. There are a lot of us 'wellies' out there."

The 59-year-old – who is about to stand down as Makar after serving her three-year term – is passionate about her adopted subject. It has been the inspiration for her next collection of poems and she campaigned for the restoration of the historic Balm Well in Liberton.

"The sound of water interests me as a poet," explains the mum-of-three, as she sips from a glass of the stuff in the cafe of the Roxburghe Hotel, a favourite writers' hangout during the Book Festival. "I've been recording the different sonic properties to work into language so the words can echo the wells and the rhythms of the poems imitate the sounds of different wells. Thankfully, they do all sound different."

The ancient position of Makar was reinstated in Edinburgh in 2002, to champion poetry in the city and reinforce the Capital's position as a cultural centre. Valerie has set about the task with gusto.

"The great Makars of the 15th and 16th centuries in particular were court poets respected for their technical powers," says Valerie, of Morningside. "My goal was to let the Makar's presence be felt in areas where I was already working – in schools, workshops and hospital arts – to make the Makar part of the community with lots of events."

She has taken part in 140 events, reading at the Unesco City of Literature first birthday event, running workshops at the ERI and other hospitals, unveiling stones to commemorate great writers, and writing a poem to celebrate the opening of the new council headquarters.

That poem, entitled To Edinburgh, was inspired by the setting of Waverley Court in the Old Town and is set to be carved on a bench in the building's inner atrium.

She is clearly unimpressed by the council's other major public art commission, the Everyman sculpture outside its HQ.

"I like the building's environmentally friendly aspect, for example how it recycles water. The artwork is a different story. I'd like to refrain from giving my opinion," she adds, breaking into a girlish giggle.

Passionate about what she does, it is her work at the ERI she feels has particularly struck a chord with others. She recalls with delight elderly patients enthusiastically reciting poems learned in their youth. The experience reinforced her conviction that schools should teach poetry by rote today.

"We were thrilled at the amount of poetry they knew and it let me see how deeply poetry is rooted in the people of Scotland. So few youngsters learn any poetry by heart, in contrast with the very elderly who get tremendous comfort from being able to recite a full poem at the end of their lives. It develops the power of memory, an ear for rhythm and the use of words and opens up the potential for using language. It should start from the nursery rhyme stage. When you are stuck at the side of the motorway you can recite till the AA get there," she adds.

The wife of William, a professor of Celtic Studies at Edinburgh University, and mother of Lachlan, Mairi and Manhattan-based jewellery designer Maeve, Valerie is proud but intensely private regarding her family.

She is happy to reveal that Maeve recently made a bespoke engagement ring for her younger sister, but clams up when asked what the ring was like, reluctant to betray the privacy of her daughters, the elder of whom she celebrated in the poem Maeve in Manhattan as the "prophet of platinum".

As she draws to the end of her tenure as Makar – her last event will be two poetry readings at the Word festival in Aberdeen during the weekend of May 10 – the poet of 40 years' standing reflects on the position she is leaving behind.

"The Makar is a great treasure of the city of Edinburgh, a cultural and international treasure because the people of other countries cherish their poets. People from other countries think more of the people of Edinburgh because they have their poet laureate."

A cancer survivor herself, she will keep up her weekly Maggie's Centre creative writing workshop and her new poetry collection, published by Luath Press, is due out in the summer. She also hopes to continue her campaigning for historic wells, aiming next to see St Anthony's Well, on Arthur's Seat, once famed for its eye-healing properties, brought back into use. And, of course, there will be other wells to bag on her holidays. "I'll keep going. There are thousands more wells to see," she grins.

To Edinburgh

Stone above storms, you rear upon the ridge:

we live on your back, its crag-and-tail,

spires and tenements stacked on your spine,

the castle and the palace linked by one rope.

A spatchcocked town, the ribcage split open

like a skellie, a kipper, a guttit haddie.

We wander through your windy mazes,

all our voices are flags on the high street.

From the sky's edge to the grey firth

we are the city, you are within us.

Each crooked close and wynd is a busy cut

on the crowded mile that takes us home

in eden Edinburgh, centred on the rock,

our city with your seven hills and heavens.