Congratulations to Robert Crawford on winning the Saltire Society’s book of the year award and commiserations to my friend Alison Lang on not winning the first book award.

News of the results is surprisingly hard to come by, with rather scant information in the BBC online report and naething ava on the Saltire Society’s own site. However, I’ve realised that, pace my earlier fulmination, there were two poetry books on the Homecoming award shortlist: Heaney’s Henryson and Jackie Kay’s The Lamplighter. Stupid of me to overlook that. My apologies to both writers, not that I expect they’ll have been reading my comments anyway!

Still, it doesn’t really affect my point about the main prizes, especially given that the Homecoming award was for this year only. In fact, it causes equal chagrin that poetry was shunted into a one-off prize, no matter how high profile said prize was supposed to be. What does this say about the value that Scotland’s literary culture places on poetry?

Ron Butlin, the current Edinburgh makar, has chosen The Ambulance Box as one of his books of the year in today’s Sunday Herald. (The piece doesn’t seem to be online so I can’t link to it.) Recommending it alongside Brian McCabe’s Zero, Tom Pow’s Dear Alice and Polly Clark’s intimate and powerful Farewell My Lovely, Ron says:

Here is a poet of genuine promise revelling in the discovery of his natural lyric gift.

Also, over at Peony Moon, Michelle McGrane is running a series of posts in which poets pick their favourite collections of the year. Fascinating lists, and I’m chuffed that The Ambulance Box has cropped up a few times.

We always knew that the heart of Salt’s sales operation was an immensely technical process to rival Amazon. Watch and be dazzled …

At last you can see me haver briefly about The Ambulance Box in the video that Jen Hamilton-Emery took before the Northern Salt reading at the Manchester Literature Festival. Here it is in all its autumnal Manucunian glory:

Over at the Salt blog, you can also see new videos of Tony Williams (whose book was very favourably reviewed in The Guardian Review last week, lucky man), John Siddique (whose collection is also available in audio format now) and Elizabeth Baines. Happy viewing!

I’m a bit slow on this one, others having blogged it already, but there’s free shipping on all UK orders until Christmas from Salt’s online shop! Not only will it make your present buying easier, but you’ll make Chris, Jen and the rest of the redoubtable Salt team — not to mention the authors — very happy.

I’m not slow on this one, however: if you’re after a change from the physical books or are particularly keen on hearing your poetry as well as reading it on the page, keep an eye on the brand new Salt Audio Books site. There are only a couple of titles on it so far, but it promises to be a fantastic resource as it grows.

Following on from yesterday’s complaint against the lack of poetry in the shortlists for the Saltire Society literary awards, it occured to me that, if a specific poetry award is the solution, perhaps StAnza might be the organisation to oblige. Of course, the funding and administration of such an award would need to be sorted out, which might take a whilie, but I can imagine that a StAnza prize for the best collection and/or best first collection could carry considerable caché in the Scottish poetry scene.

Still, deep down I’m sure there must be a better way than perpetuating and expanding the prize culture. I’m just not convinced that it is the best way to celebrate and promote new poetry — or new writing more generally — because it necessarily leads to a focus on a fairly narrow batch of writers. And I count myself as the beneficiary of some of that focus, because it usually extends to the nominees on shortlists, not winners alone. The question is, how do we move on from that culture and with what do we replace it? How do we find a model that allows a broader range of poets to be brought to wider attention and be rewarded in some way for their work? I don’t have any ideas yet. Do you?

I didn’t want to sully my celebration of the wonderful news that Alison Lang has been shortlisted Saltire Society literary awards with this gripe, so I’ve held it over for today: where on earth are the poetry books on the shortlists? There’s Crawford’s biography of Burns, but that’s the closest we get. No Hunt in the Forest, no Outside the Narrative, no Third Wish Wasted, no Farewell My Lovely, no When the Sun Turns Green to name a few that could well have been candidates for the best book list. And no Natural Mechanical or Opposite of Cabbage, to name two bleedin’ obvious candidates for the first book prize.

This is crazy, surely. So much for the year of homecoming, in which we were celebrating who, again? And remind me: just what  is it he’s famous for?* I really don’t care about the special homecoming award, you know. Perhaps we need a poetry category in the Saltire Society awards. Or perhaps, as I hinted elsewhere a while back**, we need another less winner-takes-all approach to celebrating new writing.

Or maybe we should take up pottery instead.

*No, aside from the amorous exploits.

**See my answer to question 6.

Alison's book

Big congratulations to my friend and erstwhile colleague Alison Lang, whose short-story collection Caint na Caileige Caillte has been shortlisted for the first book award in the Saltire Society Literary Awards this year! Readers furth of Scotland may not be familiar with this prize, but it’s a significant achievement in Scottish terms. Fingers crossed for her on St Andrew’s day …

In the latest Scottish Poetry Library podcast, you can hear me discuss my writing, the poets I carry with me and read “Summa” from The Ambulance Box. There’s also piece about the Southbank Centre’s new project, the Global Poetry System plus an interview with my fellow Salt poet Julia Bird. Rather than discussing her writing, Julia’s slot focuses on her work as a promoter of literary events, particularly a very interesting tour she’s putting together right now.

The SPL podcast is now a weekly afair, so don’t forget to look at the back issues and check back (or subscribe) for future treats.

Surprise, surprise: St Andrews was damp and cold when I arrived there yesterday for Distant Voices. How many StAnza memories are wrapped in that grey mizzle? Still, the Byre Theatre was as inviting as ever. After the five or six festivals I’ve been to, it’s becoming something of a home from home. A small crowd was gathering when I walked in the doors, a mix of StAnzistas, readers and pure audience. Over the course of the three or so hours I was there, the faces and numbers fluctuated at the edges, but remained steady at a respectable number for a wet afternoon in a corner of Fife.

The poets from Tbilisi kicked off the readings entirely in Georgian. A bold move, and good on them, if a bit tough on the St Andrews audience! They came through loud and clear without a technical hitch to speak of but, unfortunately, the same wasn’t true of Geneva. The Skype call to Peter McCarey and co kept dropping, so we were cut off — twice — in the midst of a sound poem, replaced with the blip-bip-dip-a-dipp-a of the Skype dialing tone. That was a huge shame, but at least the next slot was St Andrews, so Lyn Moir, Anna Crowe and I could step into the breach and read a little more than planned.

I opened the extended Byre reading with “Summa” and “Tae a Lousy Piper”, a Burns pastiche and diatribe against the dire busking bagpipers of Edinburgh, who seem far greater in number than the capable busking pipers. Then came Lyn, reading from her new, freshly launched pamphlet, Easterly, Force 10 and Anna, reading one translation from Catalan and one of her own. After that, I was back for my full set. Here’s the list:

• In Praise of Dust
• The White Dot
• Cardiac
• Berlin/Berlin/Berlin
• The Invention of Zero
• Lullaby
• Dream Family Holiday
• Breathing is the Place to Start

Lyn and I did a partial swap of our publications. I haven’t had a chance to read her pamphlet yet, but I’m looking forward to it. It’s very nicely produced by Colin Will’s Calder Wood Press.

I thoroughly enjoyed the visit to the Byre. Sadly, I had to head home very shortly after my reading, but I picked up bits and bobs of the webcast through the evening. Apparently a number of people had problems accessing the stream before 3.30, but it was functioning beautifully when I logged on. I caught bits and pieces of the readings from Vicenza, Skye, New York, Ghent (wow!) and Sacramento.

It was a bold and ambitious project. Whatever the technical hitches, Eleanor Livingstone and her international team are to be congratulated for that and for creating such a wide-ranging feast of poetry and reaching such a broad audience. They’ve proved the concept, so here’s hoping we’ll see it repeated sooner rather than later.