Poem of the month - March 2008

I watch the Robin I watch the robin whirring at the half coconut shell hang- ing from the clothes pole like a humming bird it beaks beaks into the sweet fat and seeds for its sustenance and I think of you hotpenning at your desk day after day and the thing I love is the persistence Hamish Whyte from Window on the Garden (Edinburgh: Botanic Press & Essence press, 2006)  Poem supplied courtesy of the Scottish Poetry Library

The inspiration for the poem Hamish says: 'The poem was originally a Valentine's piece, based on what I saw through the window of my study. I spent a lot of time sitting at my desk staring out the window (Raymond Chandler said writers spend 90% of their time doing this) and ended up writing about that instead of whatever I was supposed to be doing: the lines about the robin became the beginning of a long poem, a kind of diary of a year, which I called "Window on the Garden".'

About the Poet Hamish Whyte was born near Glasgow where he lived for many years until moving to Edinburgh in 2004. He has published several poetry pamphlets, the latest being Window on the Garden (Botanic Press/Essence Press, 2006) and edited many anthologies of Scottish literature, including Noise and Smoky Breath: an illustrated anthology of Glasgow poems, The Scottish Cat and An Arran Anthology. He runs Mariscat Press, publishing the poetry of Edwin Morgan, Gael Turnbull, Janice Galloway, Stewart Conn and A.L. Kennedy, among others. He has worked as a librarian, reviewed crime fiction for Scotland on Sunday and is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has a new collection of poems due out from Shoestring Press in 2008.