Vivienne Margaret Bateman
Vivienne Margaret Bateman Poems
I like a growling congregation,
hope creaking through difficult lives;
I like choirs of bright voices,
light filling dark places;
...
A pale-yellow leaf
turning on its twig and dropping,
growing smaller, flatter,
like your face today
...
The darling rabbits lie bashed on the road
in May-time's abundance of rabbits and cars,
wind courses through shining grasses,
yellow irises stand triumphant in ditches.
...
(For Colm at three years old)
You broke an Easter egg
I had kept since a child
as you danced round the fire bare-footed.
...
I looked at the old post-card,
the houses like a growth from the soil,
the peaks towering above them,
a sign of the majesty of God,
...
Often have I seen them come together,
two old friends, two crofters,
who after a brief murmured greeting
will stand wordlessly together,
...
The Highlands are not remote anymore,
with a powerful car you can reach the place in a day,
it is the bleakness of the coast
that wore the people down
...
I saw one of my poems translated
in a book of love poems from Scotland,
and it felt strange that an affair
that lasted only three weeks
...
In the grey of the dawn
you drink intently,
your eyes gaze ahead,
their brownness tells me nothing;
...
Vivienne Margaret Bateman Biography
Vivienne Margaret 'Meg' Bateman (born 1959) is a Scottish academic, poet and short story writer. Bateman was born in Edinburgh. She studied Celtic at Aberdeen University and completed a PhD in medieval Scottish Gaelic language religious poetry. She then went on to teach Scottish Gaelic at the Universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. She lectures at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, on Skye, and is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at St Andrews University. Her Scottish Gaelic poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Other Tongues (1990) and Twenty of the Best (1990). She has also translated Gaelic poetry into English for An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets (1991) and The Harp's Cry (1993). Her 1997 collection Aotromachd agus dàin eile/Lightness and other poems - her first to have facing English translations - deals with the fragility of love and human relationships. In 2011, Bateman's first ever published Scottish Gaelic short story, entitled Chanadh gun d'chur i às dha, appeared in the short story collection Saorsa published by CLÀR as part of the Ùr-sgeul series of new Scottish Gaelic fiction.)
The Best Poem Of Vivienne Margaret Bateman
Music in Church
I like a growling congregation,
hope creaking through difficult lives;
I like choirs of bright voices,
light filling dark places;
but best I like indifferent singing,
the soloist who gets the high notes flat,
the warbler who makes herself heard over all,
the organist who embarks on an extra verse;
for here is the greater challenge to love,
amid fastidiousness, vanity, human failing;
here too, appears the greater blessing,
on finding love sweeter than any singing.
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