Songs for Lara - Published by Seahorse Publications of Glasgow, September 2022. https://seahorsepublications.com/

"Songs for Lara is a collection of poems centered on the theme of love. The first impulse for the collection came as a response to Boris Pasternak's novel Dr Zhivago, which is surely one the greatest novels of the mid 20th century. Pasternak's novel is a study of how historical forces, over which one appears to have little control, impinge on the personal and intimate details of peoples' lives. I found this compelling and fascinating subject matter and could not resist the urge to investigate further through poetry. The poetry is on one level a dialogue with the Pasternak. On another level it is a reflection on what it means to be in love and how that visceral personal emotion interacts with:

1. the history of individuals at various moments throughout a lifetime, from youth to old age.
2. the personal experience as affected by the impersonal historical forces which surround us. For example climate change, war, and, cultural norms, biases and transformations.

Aside from these considerations it might also be seen simply as a book of  love poems. With all the flaws and joys that that entails."

Jim Ferguson, 30th Aug 2022.

Below is a page from Songs for Lara, as a wee taste -

    let love in -

“Suddenly he realised that he was neither dreaming nor delirious but that, in sober truth, he was lying washed and in a clean shirt, not on the sofa but in a freshly made bed, and that the person who was crying with him, who was sitting beside him, leaning over him, her hair mingling with his and her tears falling with his own, was Lara; he fainted with joy.”

 From Pasternak’s ‘Zhivago’

*

My heart the only churchbell in the world

That rings love straight to you, Lara, loving face─

Clouds and rain and soothing absolute beauty─

Delicious cure for my fevered brain

The passion upon my doomed existence

A timeless revelation ─ I melt for you

Beneath the sun, everything good

And wonderful in this life, i can't explain─

I wash my feet in the sea of tears, knowing

Love more meaningful than all the Dialogues of Plato

Spending time, together with you, joy of joys─

An unremitting pleasure of transcendence

     Below is a short poem from Songs for Lara in video form -

'each night' - from Songs for Lara - recited by Robyn Hunt

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An Unfinished Dance - Published by Rymour Books of Perth (2022) https://www.rymour.co.uk/unfinished.html

'an unfinished dance' is a book length poem which deals with history, personal journey and what it means to be a human being living in Scotland in the 2020s. Part stream of consciousness, part poetic reverie it is an incantatory, biographical voyage through mind and place. Beautifully typeset, with deployment of textual and visual techniques, Ferguson presents a poetry with narrative that drives forward a commentary on Scottish and European literature from 1800 to 2020. It is "a long poem in 4 parts on politics, literature, life: with Notes:

Part 1. A Sun God Awake at the Wheel

Part 2. No Profit in Prophets?

Part 3. There is Music in Romanticism

Part 4. As Freely as you Love"

The book was launched at Lynch's Bar, Glasgow, on Sunday 6th March 2022 during a lively afternoon of poetry, music and song.

"Genuinely experimental, Jim Ferguson forces us to see the world differently— like ‘a thought/that accidently/lands in your/head.’ The constantly changing language feeds eerie imaginings in various tongues (reflected in the use of various fonts): English, Glaswegian, Scots, and French. It is darkly comic, a manual for the dead written during the covid pandemic, it offers more than a hint of contained fury and anxiety, of empathy without sentimentality. A remarkable tale told by a voice that’s utterly compelling and which you read with the feeling that you’re being led inside the murkiest of minds. No one is in control of these irresistible and disturbing musings." Ruby McCann