Acclaimed poet Alistair Lawrie – well kent in Stonehaven as a former English teacher at Mackie Academy – will be reading from his new collection of poems at the book’s launch event on April 25.
The 78-year-old’s second collection, titled Opent Petals, is written in Doric and English and follows on from his 2024 debut, Caal Cries, both of which have been published by Drunk Muse Press.
Alistair will be reading from the new book at Stonehaven Library on Saturday April 25, 12pm-2pm. All are welcome to attend the free event where signed copies of the 80-page book will be available to buy at £10 each. Also on the bill will be Aberdeen-based poet Olive M. Ritch, whose new book, Weather Blinks, evoking her Orkney childhood, is forthcoming. Open mic slots will be available, time permitting.
Retired teacher Alistair is a well-kent figure on the north-east poetry circuit, as a founder of the Mearns Writers group, and, on a rota basis with other NE writers, he also contributes to a weekly column in The Press and Journal celebrating the Doric language. He was winner of the 2016 William Soutar Prize, the prestigious 2023 McLellan Scots Poetry Prize, and his first collection of poems, Caal Cries, was hailed in reviews as a work of “linguistic brilliance and emotional depth”.
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: “I’ve spent my time since my retirement from teaching encouraging as many folk as I could to take up writing, to find the stories, the poetry in themselves, that is in all of us. 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 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. His poetry is never less than witty, insightful and entertaining and appeals beyond the conventional audiences and readership for poetry. I’m sure this book will affirm his reputation as a renegade maestro, and will be widely read and appreciated.”