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Poets'
A-Z » Angela McSeveney
Angela McSeveney was born in Edinburgh and brought up in Ross-shire, Livingston and the Scottish Borders, where she attended Galashiels Academy for six years. She moved to Edinburgh to study in 1982 and has lived there ever since. She is currently employed as a Personal Care Assistant.
While at university she was given advice and encouragement by the Writers in Residence Ron Butlin and Liz Lochhead. Polygon published Coming Out With It in 1992 and Imprint was published in 2002 by the Edinburgh Review. A new pamphlet, Slaughtering Beetroot, has just been produced by the Mariscat Press.
Books I love
An old favourite
Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems by Liz Lochhead. I first heard her read not long after I became a student and I was blown away. I cannot over emphasise the impact it had on me. After an education scrabbling among the literary canon for meaningful role models to sit just feet away from a live female writer, smell her perfume, covet her sweater, adore her poetry, a woman from my class, my country, my time.
A new favourite
Among the most recent bundle of books borrowed from the SPL there is the Collected Poems of RS Thomas: I was inspired to reread him by the recent biography The Man Who Came Out of the West - a book so good that I read it twice.
Featured poem
Grey Hairs
As I sleep my scalp labours on
weaving glittering strands
from the dead fibres of my hair.
Never so noticeable when I was a brunette,
now they drift everywhere
like frost-rimed leaves.
Pinned to my cardigans by static
they are wrought metal jewellery,
a filigree of fancy embroidery.
They cling to the bristles of brooms,
the insides of vacuum cleaners,
clog the shower stinking of marsh gas.
I have heard of birds' nests being found
lined by hanks of it: our council guidelines suggest
mulching it down on the compost.
Then there's the pounds of skin flakes
sinking annually into the mattress
to keep the dust mites going.
It's not at the very end that we return
to the earth we came from.
It takes us back in instalments.
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