Venice masks

Saturday 30 April 2011

Refugee - Lindsay MacRae

He can't speak a word of English
But the picture he paints needs no words

In it he puts:

guns
bright orange explosions
a house with no roof
children with no shoes
and his mother and father
lying still, as though asleep.
At the bottom he puts himself, tiny and dark,
with a puddle of blue tears at his feet.
Somehow the fat yellow sun at the top of the page
has a smile on its face.

Lindsay MacRae (born 1961) Scotland

9 comments:

  1. is their an autobiography about her

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    1. Yes there is I have read it.

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  2. Thanks for your question. I don't know a huge amount about her. She's Scottish, though born in Bridlington, Yorkshire. She studied drama, film and TV at university and went on to sing and play saxophone in various pop groups before moving to Rome to work as a newsreader for Vatican Radio. She then worked in the record industry and as a journalist and TV presenter before becoming a full-time poet. She writes for both adults and children and performs poetry in pubs, clubs, art centres and schools all over the country. She worked with the poetry collective Angels of Fire alongside poets like Cheryl Moskowitz.

    She's published at least three books of poetry aimed at children: "You Canny Shove Yer Granny Off a Bus" (1996); "How to Avoid Kissing Your Parents in Public" (2000); "How to Make a Snail Fall in Love With You" (2003). She also has some poems in the book "Dancing the tightrope: new love poems by women" (1987)

    I hope that helps!

    I've just published another of her poems on this blog: you can find it here http://brucespoems.blogspot.com/2015/06/how-was-school-lindsay-macrae.html

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  3. Does this poem have verses?

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    1. It depends what you mean by verses. It doesn't have a symmetrical verse structure of a set number of lines per verse like a song might; nor does it have structures like sonnets, etc. However there are three "sections" - the first two lines, then the third line, then the last 10 lines; so you could say it has three verses.

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  4. Good to see you have kept your interest in poetry.

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  5. Can anyone help. I’m losing my mind over this. I read a Poem by her called From a distance. It is beautiful. I even contacted her at the time as I put music to it and unfortunately she didn’t reply. But now I can’t even find the poem anywhere.

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    1. Hi. As far as I know there is no on-line version of this poem, but you can find it in the book "The Works 3 – A Poet a Week” compiled by Paul Cookson, published by Macmillan ISBN-10: 1447286855

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  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

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