Acclaimed poet's Buchanhaven homecoming

Acclaimed poet Alistair Lawrie will go back to his roots with the launch of his new book of poems in Buchanhaven on January 27.

The 75-year-old former English teacher’s volume of poems, Caal Cries, draws deep on his upbringing and background in the Peterhead area.

Alistair will be reading from the collection – written in Doric and English – alongside fellow Scots poet Lesley Benzie at a free event at Buchanhaven Heritage Centre at 2.30pm on Saturday, January 27.

Lesley, who hails from Aberdeen, is renowned for her collection ‘Reared/Fessen’ as a member of the collective Wanderlust Women.

​Alsatair will be reading his collection at Buchanhaven Heritage Centre.

Retired teacher Alistair is a well-kent figure on the north-east Scottish poetry circuit, as a founder of the Mearns Writers group, and was well known throughout his teaching career for his passion for inspiring others with his love of literature.

He describes himself as a lover of “history, rock music, all kinds of fiction, beer, curry, tales and stories of all kinds but particularly like those he heard from old fishermen as a boy, Scotland, the surreal, the irreverent, subversion and the anarchic, words words words and poetry”.

He said that as a teacher he’d tried to save poetry from “assassination by dullest overkill”. In a long career, he taught English in Hamilton, Arbroath, Hawick, Stonehaven, and Aberdeen (Cults). He also taught film studies, pop culture, media studies as well as running evening classes in the Stonehaven area for 20 years.

Alistair said: "Words are what we do. Have been since we started out, in our love, in our hates, in our reflections, in our anger and in our rituals in chants. As we march to war or rail against its waste, as we pray to our gods.

“I write in Doric and English, occasionally Scots. Each poem decides for itself which but the words and the rhythms of those voices I heard as a boy breathe their lilt through all of it. The Doric is not merely for yesterday, the comical or the couthily nostalgic although it can do these things. It is as vigorously alive and as versatile in its use as the English or ony ither spik o real folk. Fit wye wid it nae be?”

Stonehaven-based poet and publisher Neil Young, whose Drunk Muse Press has published Alistair’s volume, said: “Alistair is long overdue recognition as one

of the most significant poets writing in Scotland today. He draws on long life

experience to write brilliantly on subjects as varied as memories of his Buchan

childhood to war, history and mythology – whatever pings up on his radar.

We’re very fortunate to have him right here on our doorstep.”