The poems in Behind the Idyll (Mary Thomson Books), shortlisted for this year’s Callum Macdonald Memorial Award for Poetry Pamphlets, are by the publisher herself and illustrate eloquently the realities of farming behind sentimental pastoral visions.

FARM YARD

It was both prison and play pen

walled with sandstone cowsheds

floored with river cobbles

dusty and littered in summer with hay

in winter veined with ice and snow that

turned to a sludge of mud.

~

I idled and day-dreamed there with skipping rope and ball,

swoop of swallows, chatter of sparrow, dog asleep in the sun;

peered down at night to learn the secrets of bats and owls.

~

Every day I returned to it with my satchel of books

to the smells of manure and warm milk

the steady suck and throb of milking machines

punctuated by a tail swish, a neck chain chink,

home inexorably to that inexorable twice-daily event.

No wonder I dreamed of escape.

 THE ROAN COW

Our herd had numbers not names,

but I talked to the russet roan

who stood quietly for milking

near the yard end door of the cow shed.

~

She was daintier

than the Friesians with their big feet

that might have had Dutch clogs on

they clattered so

on the cobbles of the yard.

~

My neat roan was not big-eyed

Like the one Jersey we kept for her cream

nor skittish 

like the awkward Ayrshires.

~

Only I knew her name

the day she was shoved,

mucky-rumped,

up the ramp of the slaughter house lorry.