Festival Poets
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Hugh McMillan is a poet and writer. He has eleven collections of poetry and has won many awards. He has appeared many times on radio and Literary Festivals, most recently in performances at the Stanza International Festival, Wigtown International Book Festivals in Scotland, and the Edmonton Poetry Festival in Canada.
He has been involved in many collaborations and has been commissioned for work in both poetry and prose.
Hugh is an experienced facilitator and teacher of poetry and creative writing, and has taught in schools, festivals and community groups. In 2017 he was Writer in Residence at the Harvard Summer School.
He has edited the magazine Poets Republic since 2016, and the first two of its pamphlet series ‘Bearings’. He is an editor for Drunk Muse Press. In 2020 he was appointed a ‘Poetry Champion’ for the Scottish Poetry Library, to commission new workers for its platforms. In 2021 he was chosen as Editor of the SPL’S annual anthology ‘Best Scottish Poems’.
From Here to the Sea
Hugh McMillan
I have flushed out animals today:
a young deer bolting across
wet grass near Kilmaurs
and a hawk at Garelochhead
arrowing between trees.
Maybe it was the train did it,
but I think it was me nosing north
like the hawk on a wing and a prayer,
like the deer on a body swerve.
Sunlight is strung through cloud
and ahead the weather is bending
like a bar round mountains.
This is as ever a journey
from the central belt of my life
to the high hills of my imagination,
hard to describe:
sometimes I run beside the train,
sometimes the dead live,
their conversation
frozen in the silver air.
The country is alive too-
the rocks breathe and even
the rain is saying something
dripping in a romance language
down wet windows.
Oh a heron! Sheet music
beating from here to the sea.
