Michael Pederson, the Edinburgh poet known as a leading light of poetry/rock/spoken word events Neu Reekie is now the official Makar – charged with creating work to celebrate the city.
Already Writer in Residence of Edinburgh University Pederson will be Makar for a year, after being chosen to represent the city during its 900 year anniversary.
He says: “Finding myself as Edinburgh’s new Makar is a thrill supreme! I’m brio filled and beaming from it. From Parson’s Green Primary to Portobello High School, from years of running literary events with Neu! Reekie! to finding myself as the current Writer in Residence at Edinburgh Uni, I’ve been married to poetry throughout. I’ve published three collections over a ten-year period and feel like I’m only getting started.
“Edinburgh is one of the world’s foremost poetry cities, and I’m elated and electrified to be setting off fireworks (hopefully conceptually and literally) for both these bastions of beauty. I told my Granny first, then my Ma, the rest will follow. Long live love and poetry and Edina.”
Michael, who is known for writing about the soft and vulnerable aspect of masculinity, kindly shared one of his poems with Entertainment Now to mark the occasion
let the lilac
having hared through the day
let me be your armchair
by the night window—unhaul,
coorie in; into this cradle
of salt & buffer inject
those wayfarer bones; douse down
the day’s flare of voices—
see the restless gritters sleep
or, better still, delete themselves;
be held, a pebble lagooned
in water’s midnight minerals;
behold moon plated in the eyes
of an owl—starlight’s lapidary scrawl
rallying the dark like hot ash caught
on spiderweb; the luminescence
graffiti-ing your slippers
& sloshed onto the chin’s timber;
hush now, as, on my lap, you begin
a dreamer’s mumble,
somnambulant lips kiss the air
until finding my skin
https://www.michaelpedersen.co.uk
You can buy The Cat Prince and Other Poems here:
