Callum Robert Forbes Irvine

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone – I hope you’re having restful, joyous, and love-filled days!

It’s an apt day to pull out and share some close-ups of a few of T. S. Eliot’s gorgeous Christmas Cards – I think the 1950 card is my favourite! 🎄

Great news from the wonderful folks behind Project Fergusson @rfergussonpoet.bsky.social, who've worked with
Taproot Press to produce this beauty! Very honoured to have contributed 'The Last Tavern', a Dantesque encounter between Burns and Fergusson, and to be in the company of such amazing poets!

We're thrilled to announce 'O'er a' my labours sey your skill: Poetic Responses to Robert Fergusson.
Across Scots, English and Gaelic, a wealth of contemporary poets respond to Fergusson's work, proving that, 250 years since his death, his song immortal lives!
taprootpressuk.co.uk/product/oer-...

Two books arrived on the same day, waiting for me at home having forgotten I’d ordered either of them a long while back: the posthumous books of Heaney and John— sad in themselves, but full of hope and beauty in their pages

YouTube video by Passenger NL Passenger live at Pinkpop 2013 - FULL SHOW

An exceptionally apt day to share one of my favourite songs: 27 by @passengermusic —
From 33:00 to 36:18 in this video is my favourite performance of it

youtu.be/DRrgWOCEDsI?...

Poet and author Dr Peter Mackay appointed Scotland’s next Makar Dr Mackay is the fifth person to hold the role since it was established by the Scottish Parliament in 2004.

Superb news.

news.stv.tv/scotland/poe...

Here’s a provisional clanjamfry of scholars, novelists, bodies and poets involved in Scottish literature and present on Bluesky.

Feel free to comment if you’d like to be added.

go.bsky.app/3EEXPcA

Thank you for this! 💙

If there’s another cure for this last week other than buying books, then I don’t know of it 📚

The morning was spent working on Dante, and I wish more epics were collaboratively translated by modern and contemporary poets like this. Imagine an Aeneid with Heaney’s Book VI, combined with some Carson, Paterson, Oswald, and so on adapting a book each?

There’s a few that come to mind with the same preoccupations of learning and unlearning, though not necessarily first-day-of-School: The Graduates by Kathleen Jaime, An Tiona/The Tin by Padraig MacAoidh/Peter Mackay, for example!