Gerda Stevenson’s long-awaited first full-length collection is filled with song and music – skipping rhymes, piano, dance and marching music, laments and lullabies. She sings about butterflies, snowberries, aunts, teachers, Pentland rain, Sarajevo roses, graveyards, driftwood and the lost Eden of childhood; about wild weather, warm companionship and unmarked graves, about Bosnia, Iraq, Syria the Pyrenees and Scotland. If This Were Real is a kind of autobiography in verse, informed by intense relationships with places and people, by the personal and the political, by family life and the wider community in her native Scotland and beyond. Stevenson’s experience as an actor and singer/song-writer is evident in the rhythmic sound structure of her writing – these are poems that demand not just to be read, but to be performed, ‘spot-lit lies, / floodlit truths, and shadowed ambiguities / in our retellings of the world’s old tales’.
Reviews:
“… compassionate, defiant and honest. The inherent fallibilities and sad frailties of humankind and nature are explored with an edgy panache. Stevenson finds, and recreates, a magnificent joy. These cool or impassioned, always clear-eyed, poems comfort and disturb, sadden and enlighten; they at once ground and elevate the reader. Though Gerda Stevenson is very much a poet with her own style, If This Were Real put me in mind of Iain Crichton Smith’s A Life, both books being autobiographical collections written by remarkable Scots who have had lives rich in moments of eloquence, insight and empathy.” Kevin MacNeil, ASLS magazine, The Bottle Imp, 2014
IF THIS WERE REAL, by Gerda Stevenson:
“In ‘Co-Op Funeral Parlour’, with which I’m still light-headed, the speaker contemplates her own child, as the infant lies in a coffin. The poem’s vertiginous emotional charge is achieved by the unflinching control of the language in the face of intimate, inscrutable devastation – as if daring itself to find the image, and let that image do its dark work. The best poems here fuse figurative and emotional life to haunting effect.” WordPress, 2014.
“… depth, humanity, music. Love poems in the widest sense.” The Eidlon Tree Magazine, 2013.
“Stevenson’s wonderful 25-minute theatre-poem Skeleton Wumman, featuring one actress and two on-stage musicians is inspired by native American tales as well as by Scotland’s huge tradition of sea stories; its strange, ecstastic ending leaves the audience gasping, with the power of its poetry and storytelling.” The Scotsman, 2012
“A tranquil domestic moment caught by the distinguished pen of Gerda Stevenson, actress, writer and director.” Lesley Duncan, Poetry Editor, The Herald.
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Scotia Nova: Poems for the Early Days of a Better Nation, Luath Press, ed. Alistair Findlay and Tessa Ransford, £7.99
“For me, the strongest poem here is Gerda Stevenson’s Hame-comin. The title refers to Holyrood’s Homecoming initiative, but this is no holiday. Stevenson adopts the voice of a soldier returning from a tour of duty. The red hackle of the Black Watch (“€œyon cramasie flooer”) is compared to “bluid”, and the soldier’s return is marred because their “fieres are laid in the grund”, and they are haunted by “yon bairn […] blew tae hell like a smirr o eldritch confetti”. The poem raises questions about Scotland’s values, politics and place on the world stage, and doesn’t offer an easy answer. Its powerful language shows a complex, mature Scotland.“
Reviewed by Michael Grieve in THE SAINT, St. Andrew’s University, February, 2015:
“The stand-out poem for me was “I am the Esperance” by Gerda Stevenson, which imagines the creations of the workforce – the floating crane Hikitia, home from Wellington, the Empire Nan, a stout tug, the Delta Queen “her great stern wheel churns the foam / as she steams in from the Mississippi” – “canvas unfurled, freighted with hope, / as wave upon wave, you surge into Glasgow Green”.” The Morning Star, reviewing the anthology A Rose Loupt Ooot, published by Smokestack Books, 2011.
“Gerda Stevenson was at Atkinson-Pryce for a memorably good evening, reading from her first collection of poetry, “If This Were Real”, to a full house.
Stevenson’s talent as an actress brings a quality to her readings which is quite brilliant. There is no gap in between the essence of the poem and the delivery, which is immediate and intense. During discussion afterwards, it was fascinating to hear her view that her many talents are part of the whole: acting, writing, directing, singing – and poetry reading.” Atkinson-Pryce Events webpage, Thursday 5th September, 2013
 | Gerda StevensonGerda Stevenson, actor/ writer/ director/singer-songwriter, trained at R.A.D.A., London, winning the Vanbrugh Award. She has worked on stage, television, radio and film throughout Britain and abroad. In 2014, she was nominated as one the Saltire Society’s OUTSTANDING WOMEN OF SCOTLAND. From the Stevenson family of musicians (her father the composer/pianist Ronald, sister composer/harper Savourna, and niece composer/fiddler Anna-Wendy), Gerda is known for her singing in many theatre productions. She was nominated in 2014 for the MG ALBA TRAD MUSIC AWARDS, in the SCOTS SINGER OF THE YEAR category. With support from Creative Scotland, a highly acclaimed CD of her own songs, NIGHT TOUCHES DAY, was released in 2014 (Gean Records, produced by Mattie Foulds), her vocals accompanied by an array of fine Scottish musicians: James Ross, Konrad Wiszniewski, Inge Thompson, Seylan Baxter, Rob MacNeacail, and Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Kyrre Slind. She is one of the MADGE WILDFIRE trio,with Patsy Seddon and Kathy Stewart. She has written extensively for radio and is regularly heard in BBC Radio 4’s popular PAUL TEMPLE MYSTERIES, playing Steve, feisty wife of the eponymous hero. She performed in, and directed her stage play FEDERER VERSUS MURRAY (published by prestigious American literary magazine SALMAGUNDI), touring the production toNew York in 2012, as part ofthe Scottish Government’s NYC SCOTLAND WEEK celebrations. Gerda’s poetry collection, IF THIS WERE REAL, (pub. Smokestack Books, 2013) was reviewed in The Sunday Herald as: “The best of the new in contemporary Scottish poetry – not to be missed.” |
