The year was 1941, my father told me,
And by moonlight, as he ploughed the field,
Plough and harness a dull grey silver
The dark clouds parted, and revealed
Nazi bombers, bound for Clydebank,
High above over Abernyte,
The boy below, frozen in furrow
Reins in hand, awed by the sight.
I never thought he was the weaker,
In the face of brutality he never bowed down
And the boy, with the horse and the plough, entrusted,
Ploughed his seed into the ground.
I saw a man, just like my father,
In a field planting rice, in Vietnam.
So small he looked, against the bombers,
In the face of vain strength, a resolute man,
A ploughman, like my father
And a man of the land,
Although cultures divide them,
Together they stand.
In Bosnia, I saw the children who fled,
Their homes destroyed, their parents dead.
Their fields unploughed and the seeds unsown,
Their graves unmarked and their names unknown.
They spoke to me of the moonlight man,
Standing alone, with horse and plough,
More than speeches or politicians,
He led the way, he showed me how,
That to stand alone is no great shame
If something is taken in another’s name.
And remember, always, that you are a man
And the reins are held in your own hand
And that children are seeds as yet unsown,
Who may, come the harvest, be your own.

John Renbourn was one of the original members of Pentangle, the innovative folk group formed in the late 1960s. After the group split up John continued touring, composing, recording and teaching right up until March 2015, when he was on tour with the legendary Wizz Jones.

In the mid-1990s, poet and travel writer Morelle Smith accompanied John Renbourn in his journeys across the USA and Europe, from the pale blue skies over San Francisco to the deep blue of the Mediterranean Sea.

Written in planes, ferries, cafes and hotel rooms,Every Shade of Blue describes their travels together.

Arts of Resistance examines the lives and work of leading figures from Scotland’s arts world in the twentieth century, concentrating on poets and artists but also including writers, musicians and architectural visionaries such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Patrick Geddes.

Review by Ronald Black ‘Stretch, pull and bend.’ These are words as powerful for the oarsman as ‘On your marks, get set, go’ for the runner or ‘Load, aim, fire’ for the soldier. No doubt there are many other such triads. These things have a special force of their own, all to do with testing […]

Praise over all to Ben Dorain –
She rises beneath the radiant beams of the sun –
In all the magnificent range of the mountains around,
So shapely, so sheer are her slopes, there are none
To compare; she is fair, in the light, like the flight
Of the deer, in the hunt, across moors, on the run,
Or under the green leafy branches of trees, in the groves
Of the woods, where the thick grass grows,
And the curious deer, watchful and tentative,
Hesitant, sensitive: I have had all these clear, in my sight.

This tale of intrigue and betrayal goes to the heart of events surrounding the Treaty of Union in 1707. Daniel Foe (better known as Defoe), sent to Scotland to sway opinion towards Union, reports to his English spymaster. But Edinburgh is already a hotbed of counter-plots and nascent rebellion. Foe’s encounters with a landlady who is not what she seems, and with a beautiful Jacobite agent, lead him to become a novelist, against his better instincts.

Rooted in place through habitation and close observation; an exploration of Sunart and Saari through its languages: Gaelic, Finnish, English, birdsong and world news; heaping language onto landscape and excavating what’s been before, An Oakwoods Almanac reinvents a classic form.

A fox hears voices. A dogfox of indeterminate gender careers round desert USA, Hiroshima & Nagasaki in stolen cars & on foot. A barkingdog talks out loud & sings. A demotic fox listens & listens. A coyotefox lies. A coyote speaks truth. A kitfox reads the signs & tunes the car radio. Kitsune eats & drinks. They are all that person himself, who is also summoner of kingfishers, bringer of acorns, old compound eye, the one geese kiss & the drinker of aftershock. that person himself wanders in atom-bomb test sites, mooches in nuclear weapon fallout, from bar to deer park, from festical to raised landscape