Download: W@W Women’s Work in the Highlands programme

Poetry for me functions as a touchstone, something I turn to when I need to check out my understanding of life’s big questions of birth, death, loss, love, identity, cruelty, how we fit with nature, how nature fits with us… Poems provide me with little portals into this world from new angles that render all that’s familiar strange again. They make the ordinary miraculous and the miraculous ordinary.

Take the poem, The Barrel Annunciation by Kathleen Jamie, from Jizzen 1999. What’s the story behind it? After a spring storm, the poet finds she’s pregnant and imagines that it is the act of emptying the pail of rain water into the rain barrel that has cast a spell and caused her to conceive unexpectedly. Linking the two events, she instils in the poem a kind of fairy tale magic, full of wonder, but also a bit creepy.

When terrible things are happening in the world, Margaret Atwood’s poetry helps me to face them without covering my eyes and sticking my fingers in my ears. Her poem sequence, Four Small Elegies, from Two Headed Poems, 1978, has provided me with the words I quote most often when trying to comprehend human cruelty to other human beings: ‘Those whose houses were burned / burned houses. What else ever happens / once you start?’; ‘Again / those who gave the orders / were already somewhere else, / of course on horseback.’; ‘His hatred of the words / that had been done became children … he told them / one story only.’ The poems in the sequence are almost unbearable in their depiction of cruelty. And yet, Margaret Atwood must have had to imagine her way into the lives not only of the people who fled but the people who torched the houses. She allows the reader to feel sympathy for the Glengarry highlanders who, themselves victims of the Highland Clearances, emigrated to Canada where some of them took part in the massacre. It is her evocation, in simple, vivid detail, of the poverty and desperate hunger of the perpetrators that makes their cruelty almost inevitable.