Hamish Whyte

Hamish Whyte was born near Glasgow where he lived before moving to Edinburgh in 2004. He has edited many anthologies of Scottish literature, including Noise and Smoky Breath: an illustrated anthology of Glasgow poems 1900-1983, An Arran Anthology, and Kin: Scottish Poems about Family, and co-edited several issues of New Writing Scotland. Scottish Cats: an anthology of poems was published by Birlinn in 2013.

He runs Mariscat Press, publishing the poetry of Edwin Morgan, Gael Turnbull, Janice Galloway, Stewart Conn, Douglas Dunn, Angela McSeveney, Anna Crowe, James McGonigal, Ian McDonough, Christine De Luca, Jim Carruth and A.L. Kennedy, among others.

He’s an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow and plays percussion in the band The Whole Shebang. His collection of poems, A Bird in the Hand, was published in 2008 by Shoestring Press. A new collection, also from Shoestring, The Unswung Axe, came out in 2012. In 2007 he was a joint Robert Louis Stevenson Fellow with Diana Hendry. A pamphlet, Hannah, Are You Listening?, was published by HappenStance in 2013.

website: www.mariscatpress.com

Walking up from the river
the flood defence man
in his orange helmet
and yellow high-vis jacket
whistles back to the blackbird
singing out from the cherry blossom.
A cat pads past and the trill
turns to warning.
‘That cat,’ the man says to his mate,
‘is a lion.’
There’s a breeze
and petals drift down
like flakes of snow.

From New Writing Scotland 32