Dead Good Poets

Poetry at Books and Beans
Belmont Street, Aberdeen

Magi Gibson

Thursday 30 October 2008
6.30pm - 8pm

Books and Beans, Belmont Street, Aberdeen

Admission free

Poetry open mic as usual

Dead Good Poets welcome guest poet Magi Gibson, well known to North-East audiences for the time she spent as Writer-in-Residence to Aberdeenshire Council.

Magi Gibson has held three Scottish Arts Council Creative Writing Fellowships and one Royal Literary Fellowship. She has published four collections of poetry. Her sequence, The Senile Dimension, won the Scotland on Sunday / Women 2000 Writing Prize. Her work appears in Scottish Love Poems and Modern Scottish Women Poets (both Canongate), and The Twentieth Century Book of Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh University Press). Her third poetry collection, Wild Women of a Certain Age, published by Chapman, is now in its third print run. Magi also writes for children. She lives in Glasgow with partner Ian Macpherson.

Shhhhh....

they found me in the corner
way at the back
of my mother's wardrobe

at first they thought I was a button
broken loose from a frayed thread
or a mothball, happy in the dark

then as I grew, they thought I was
a shoe without a partner, but
they were busy folk — it was easier
to poke me back beside the fallen
jumpers and the missing socks

as for me, I was quite content
tucked up in the folds of mother's frocks

from time to time she'd drag me out
wear me, dangled prettily
on the end of her arm — the ultimate accessory
a quiet daughter