Tessa Ransford

Tessa Ransford OBE, Hon.DUniv (Paisley), MA, Dip Ed
Poetry Practitioner and Adviser

31 Royal Park Terrace, Edinburgh EH8 8JA, Scotland, U.K.
Tel : 0131 661 1277
E-mail: wisdomfield@talk21.com

Photograph by Mike Knowles

The Nightingale Question : 5 Poets from Saxony

Recent news

New on Tessa Ransford's website is a facility for reading any of her previously published poems on‐line. Please click on the link above: 'Poems from previous collections'. You will be taken to book titles and can then proceed to the poems in each book under that title.

Tessa Ransford has collaborated with Palestinian poet Iyad Hayatleh, who lives in Glasgow, on a two-way translation project for a book, a rug of a thousand colours, with poems inspired by the Five Pillars of Islam, to be published by Luath; and another new book from Luath: don't mention this to anyone, of poems featuring India and Pakistan with biographical excerpts, and Urdu calligraphy by Jila Peacock. Both books should be published this year, 2012.

The Golden Thread series of poetry readings, arranged by Tessa at St. John's Episcopal Church's Festival of Spirituality, was continued again in 2011 - see below and blogspot: www.goldpoetrythread.blogspot.com. This coming August 2012 the readings will take place on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 5.30 p.m. in the Cornerstone Bookshop below St John's. The poets are from Scotland beyond Edinburgh, two each day with a singer-songwriter, Toby Mottershead.

Not Just Moonshine, new and selected poems
Tessa Ransford
Luath Press,
Edinburgh 543/2 Castlehill, The Royal Mile, Edinburgh, EH1 2ND
Email: sales@luath.co.uk
Price : £12.99
ISBN 1-906307-77-6
This book, a selection of Tessa's poems over four decades was published in August 2008 in time for a reading at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

A review that appeared in the Scottish Review of Books in November 2008 can be viewed here (PDF) : Review

The book's cover can be viewed here : Not Just Moonshine

Interviews with Tessa Ransford

The Reading Room : Ryan Van Winkle chats with Tessa Ransford, founding director of the Scottish Poetry Library. In part one, they discuss the founding of the Library and Tessa's own memories of the Edinburgh poetry scene including Norman MacCaig. In part two Tessa talks about the early days of the library, the opening event in 1984 and its role in the invention of Vegetarian Haggis, the Iain Crichton Smith poem which inspired the new building and we get to hear a few of her poems.

Note : these two links are very large (25 mB) files.

A published interview with Tessa appears in World Literature Today, a journal from Oklahoma, March-April issue 2010. www.worldliteraturetoday.com
A wide-ranging published interview with Tessa by Ruth O'Callaghan can be found in Markings 27 which can be read or purchased on line at www.markings.org.uk.
There is an interview in Fras publications No 3: Interviews with Scottish Writers (2007)
Reviews of Not Just Moonshine appeared in Northwords Now and The Eildon Tree: (PDF file with reviews of Not Just Moonshine.) 2010

Essays on Tessa Ransford

by A.C. Clarke is in Zed 2 0 no 2, autumn 2007
by Professor Richard Roberts is in Scottish Affairs no 64 Summer 2008, entitled 'Surrender without submission: Tessa Ransford, Somatic Sophia and the Daughters of Jepthah'
See also Markings 27

Audio

Audio file : Chanticleer a setting of Tessa's poem Chanticleer (from 'Not Just Moonshine') by singer-songwriter Toby Mottershead.

MP3 recordings of Tessa Ransford:
LINK to 'Alarming Times'.
LINK to 'Goldilocks Principle'.
LINK 'Magic' (english).
LINK 'Magic' (german).

Tessa is editor and translator of

"The Nightingale Question : 5 Poets from Saxony"

which has been published by Shearsman Books (www.shearsman.com).

In the 2002, poet Tessa Ransford and artist Joyce Gunn-Cairns travelled to Leipzig as part of a Scottish Arts Council travel award. While there, Tessa investigated the local poetry scene and translated 5 poets who are based in Saxony: one in Weimar, one near Dresden and three from Leipzig itself. Joyce sketched portarits of each of the writers and made the portrait photographs that grace the cover of this book.

The poets included are Wulf Kirsten. Uta Mauersberger, Andreas Reimann, Thomas Rosenlöcher, Elmar Schenkel and Tessa Ransford herself. (The book cover is shown on the left).

Poems and Angels by Tessa Ransford

ISBN 9780955289668

These twenty-four poems represent Tessa Ransford's latest publication in pamphlet form. The idea for this selection, published under her wisdomfield imprint and typeset by Textualities, grew out of conversations between the poet and the visual artist Jila Peacock and their shared interest in the idea of angels, and has been specially produced for a reading at Rosslyn Chapel in August 2011.

In this selection, the angelic is not necessarily understood in terms of the heavenly realm where 'pure contingent spirits' are traditionally represented as playing harps and singing hosannas ... Indeed, for the greater part, the angelic is as much an aspect of this worldly realm as of the heavenly - though there is no strict demarcation - and sometimes it is expressed only implicitly. For Ransford, the angelic message can just as readily manifest itself in the wonder of cowrie shells once collected by a grandson on the beach at North Berwick, in the aweful beauty of the 'lightest snow' that falls over Tintern Abbey, in Scottish autumn sunlight that transforms wet leaves to silver and dry leaves to gold, as it can in the icons of the Russian Orthodox tradition, in the minaret where flames the 'one true thought', and in the quivering and quaking reeds that miraculously withstand the force of desert storms.

This most attractively made pamphlet comes with its own band of angels in the form of Jila Peacock's 'heads' that adorn the front and back covers. These heads have a timeless quality, and like angels are only partly scrutable. They are suggestive of ancient Ethiopian cave paintings, but can just as easily be read as examples of modern hieroglyphs - the 'emoticon' that some attach to txt msgs.

Michael Lister