Recently published
TIME SEEDS
A collection of poems by Margaret Elphinstone which range from the personal to the planetary. They draw on memory, landscape, history and lived experience to explore what it means to endure, to care, and to imagine a future still worth inhabiting – even if its form remains uncertain. Published by Wild Goose Publications.
Time Seeds reviewed
...a tuning fork for the anxieties of the age.
From the very first poem in Margaret Elphinstone’s beautiful collection, Time Seeds, you know you are in the presence of a writer with a soul. I mean that not in a religious sense – the soul’s existence is a conundrum for minds with greater philosophical skills than my own – but in a spiritual sense. This is writing of the most sensitive, honest kind, a gift from a generous and thoughtful spirit who is unafraid to look at the harshness of life yet exquisitely aware of the natural world around her.
In her life Margaret Elphinstone has been both a gardener and an acclaimed writer of historical novels – her last novella, the dystopian Lost People, was short-listed for the 2025 Saltire Society’s Scottish National Book Awards. She is acutely responsive to landscape and nature, not only now but through history, whether it’s the bats which have roosted in a clock tower for hundreds of years or the "live cathedral/of arching beech trees/beside white waterfalls." There is a respect here for the enduring nature of plants and trees – in Resistance she celebrates those who flower in poor soil, the weeds which spring up in the wastelands we have made, in bombsites and rotting concrete and neglected spaces. Shéiyi, a prose poem, is written in the voice of a tree, the Sitka Spruce, which grows over two hundred feet tall and can live for eight hundred years. Humans, she notes, come on borrowed time.
The book starts with an almost valedictory feeling, a sense that life is coming to an end, "when I must return this thrilling book/to its cosmic shelf". Yet Margaret Elphinstone’s thoughts are with the children, with the kind of world she is leaving them. Throughout this book she agonises over the rising seas, the forests’ battle for survival, the disappearance of birds. She reminds her children of the scootie-allans (arctic skuas) whiich used to dive-bomb them on the way to school, the bonxie (great skua) knocking one of their hats off, and asks them to remember "how happy she would have been if the birds ever returned". Her underlying fear, of course, is that they never will. With its finely calibrated language and powerful imagery Elphinstone’s poetry is like a tuning fork for the anxieties of the age. In Song for a Future, the final poem in the book, she wonders, "How could I dare suppose/ you would be safe?"
Jean Rafferty, journalist
274 MILES
Tantallon Tir is a welcome new arrival on the Scottish publishing scene and I am delighted to be among the 40 contributors to its debut anthology, 274 miles.
274 is the length in miles of the Scottish mainland: it is also the word limit to which every contributor had to work. Even the busiest reader cannot claim lack of time to delve into this eclectic collection.
THERE SHE GOES
Margaret Elphinstone is one of 17 contributors to There She Goes, a collection of women's writing on the experience of travel edited by Esa Aldegheri. Margaret is pictured reading her chapter, Sea Crossings: Time Circles, at the book's launch.
There She Goes is published by Saraband.
PAPERBOATS
PaperBoats Zine 5 celebrates Earth Day 2025.
Resistance
is those who flower in poor soil:
groundsel, self-heal, bittercress, speedwell;
is celandines forcing their way
through cracks in rotten concrete...
IRISH PAGES
An essay by Margaret Elphinstone: An Ecology of Haunting: Re-forming a Future from Scotland's Past appears as a contribution to Stands Scotland here it did? in the Scottish Edition of Irish Pages, a bi-annual journal of contemporary writing. The edition is edited by Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson.
WHAT WINTER WANTS
Margaret Elphinstone is one of fifty contributors to What Winter Wants, a unique anthology of poetry published by Rymour Books. Each poet was given the three-word prompt of the title and allowed to interpret it in any way they chose. Each poet then nominated another to continue the process resulting in this impressive collaborative collection, compiled by Douglas Thompson. The book is available from Rymour Books, priced £11.99. ISBN 9781739480134
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