Earlier this year saw the successful launch of Alistair Lawrie’s newest poetry collection, Opent Petals, at Stonehaven Library where an afternoon of readings, laughter and discussion celebrated both the poet’s latest work and the enduring power of spoken verse.
The library provided an intimate backdrop for the event, drawing together local writers, poetry enthusiasts and curious newcomers for what quickly became less a formal book launch and more a shared celebration of language and storytelling.
Opening the afternoon Drunk Muse Press publisher, Neil Young described Lawrie as, “one of the most significant poets writing in Scotland today”, praising both his literary voice and his contribution to Scots and Doric poetry.
The event began with readings from Aberdeen-based Orkney poet, Olive M. Ritch whose work from her new book, Weather Blinks explored inspiration, memory and images of Scottish culture, setting the tone for an afternoon rooted deeply in identity, voice and place.
When Lawrie took to the stage, his readings transformed poetry from words on a page into vivid lived experiences, rich with humour, memory and sharply observed characters. At one point the audience were wrapped in laughter during the performance of a poem recounting Lawrie’s time working for the SQA in Glasgow.
Other readings included Mike, Bittie Things, Hasta La Vista and Baldarroch, each showcasing a different register of his writing, satirical, lyrical, reflective and comic by turns.
The readings were followed by an open mic session featuring local Stonehaven voices, further reinforcing the sense of poetry as a communal art form rather than an academic exercise.
The consensus among many attending the event seemed to be that poetry allows private emotions and memories to become collective lived experiences, shared between poet and listener.
That idea would likely resonate with Lawrie himself.
For part of his life the former English teacher has been wanting to convince people that poetry belongs to everyone, it is not simply something to be studied for exams, but one of humanity’s oldest and most instinctive forms of expression.
After four decades teaching English and serving as Head of English at Cults Academy, Lawrie became increasingly frustrated with the way poetry was taught in schools.
“The only time, once you’re past second year in secondary school, that you come across poetry is to learn a poem, dissect it and work out every nuance of meaning so you can write an exam essay about it,” he says. “That’s not why poets write poetry.”
For Lawrie, the problem was never teachers themselves, “The teachers are doing the best they can,” he explained, “the major flaw is the examination system.” Lawrie recalls the repetitiveness of marking hundreds of essays on the same handful of set texts year after year, stating, “that system kills poetry.”
Lawrie’s own relationship with poetry began not in a classroom, but in detention. As a teenager, bored “out of my skull” while sitting in a school library, he picked up a collection of late 19th and early 20th century poetry and encountered the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins for the first time.
“I was blown away by it,” he recalls, “it was just so different and powerful.”
He read the poems repeatedly until he could recite them from memory, even quoting them to a bewildered lassie on their way home from the pictures one night. Around the same time, a teacher played recordings of actors and poets reading verse aloud, including Dylan Thomas performing his own work.
Lawrie explained, “That combined with the other thing blew me away and made me messianic with poetry”, “I’ve spent my life since then boring people with, ‘Have you read such and such? It’s wonderful.'”
For Lawrie, poetry is not an elite art form but something instinctive and ancient, “It seems to me the most natural form of human expression,” he says, “Poetry has been around since the beginning, since we lived in caves.”
He points to rhythm as something embedded within human existence itself, “if you think about how our bodies are made up, everything is symmetrical, everything has a kind of rhythm, our hearts, walking down the street, there is rhythm in what we do.”
Even graffiti, he jokes, often instinctively drifts into poetic form, “If someone chooses to write something on a toilet wall there’s a fair chance it’s going to be in a poetic form,” he says, “I’m not saying it’s going to be the greatest poetry ever.”
From this it appears that poetry resists being confined to any one category, instead it shifts into whatever form the writer, reader or listener wishes it to be.
Opent Petals itself resists any single overarching theme. Instead, Lawrie describes the collection as a gathering of poems written mostly over the past three or four years, exploring a variety of emotions, “There are some that I hope are funny,” he says, “some are very serious and some are satirical and some are lyrical. They’re a mixture.”
That refusal to over-explain his own work is central to his philosophy as a poet, “If the poem doesn’t say it then it’s kind of failed, it shouldn’t need me to come behind it and explain what it’s about.”
The collection draws heavily on memory, local history and the landscapes of the North-East. Several poems are rooted in Peterhead and Aberdeenshire, places whose voices and narratives remain central to his work.
Among the poems closest to him is Sandy, inspired by a memorable figure from his Peterhead childhood, and Pillbox, which uses the image of a collapsing Second World War bunker sliding into the sand dunes near Peterhead as a meditation on Britain’s post-Empire transformation.
Speaking on Pillbox, Lawrie stated, “The poem is about that shift that happened during my lifetime, and the fact that the country we live in is irrevocably changed.”
Many of the collection’s poems are written in Doric, the North-East Scots dialect Lawrie sees not as a novelty, but as an essential voice for expression, “I don’t think to myself, ‘I’ve got to write a Doric poem today,’” he explains, “the poem itself kind of seems to know whether it should be in Scots or English.”
Writing in Doric, Lawrie explains, allows him to shift tone more naturally, sharpen humour and create emotional textures unavailable in standard English, “There is a naturalness to some of that language,” he says, “the poems that are most powerfully meaningful to me tend to be in Doric.”
He delights in Doric’s vivid vocabulary and musicality, describing it as a language rich in sound, rhythm and subtle emotional distinctions, explaining that, “It gives you greater reach as a writer”.
Perhaps it was this richness that created the warm, welcoming atmosphere of the Stonehaven launch, where spoken poetry and storytelling felt entirely at home. Throughout the launch, poetry felt less like an academic subject and more like a living conversation, bringing people together through shared experience, emotion, and a sense of connection that reached far beyond the words themselves.
After a final round of readings from both Ritch and Lawrie, the afternoon concluded with audience members purchasing signed copies of Opent Petals, and continuing discussions that had begun earlier in the day.
For Lawrie, whose inspiration comes from “a lifetime of reading poetry”, the launch was a reminder that poetry was never meant to stay trapped inside exam papers.
Copies of Opent Petals are available from the Drunk Muse Press website (Opent Petals by Alistair Lawrie — Drunk Muse Press), But n Ben Books, Ink and Quill or Giulanotti’s.