Born in Dumfries in 1947, and brought up there and in Glasgow, James McGonigal combines teaching and creative writing with publications and research in special educational needs, Scottish and Irish literature, and literary modernism, and is editor of the new SCROLL series (Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature) published by Rodopi.

He has published poetry and prose for adults and children (in both English and Scots language), and co-edited several anthologies of contemporary writing in the New Writing Scotland series in the 1990s. His poetry and translations have been quite widely published in literary magazines and some are collected in Driven Home (Mariscat, 1998) and in the tri-lingual long poem in English, Scots and Irish Gaelic, Passage/An Pasaíste (Mariscat, 2004). As a writer, he has worked with school and community groups. His poetry has won literary prizes in Scotland and Ireland, and a bursary in 2002 from the Scottish Arts Council.

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Featured poem

Flight

To wake into this night silence
when the wind has dropped
and everything is aftermath and dark

– this is the dream they spoke about,
this is belated, vanished clean away
into the sleep of a child.

I had forgotten how quietly
a baby’s skin alters in starlight.
When morning comes two hours from now

he will seem like a different child –
one having flown through open skies
to alight here in the first cries of the day.

James McGonigal © 2006