THE runner-up publishing prize in the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award for poetry pamphlets has also gone to Mariscat Press, this time for A Witch Among the Gooseberries, featuring widely ranging poems by Ian McDonough (including some by and to ghosts!).

A real-life artist is his theme here.

THE BURIED SUN

Rembrandt Van Rijn: Self Portrait

Age two, they said, I drew the outline of a sparrow in the dirt.

Soon my eye consumed the whole of Leyden,

fingers etched with light, ears burning

with a score of crafty secrets from old Swanenburch,

Pieter Lastmann's recipe for clouds.

Fast enough I left them, the old devils, to their tricks,

set out to snare the glory of our world. Year on year,

rejoicing, aching, among gesso chalk and glue,

layering imprimatura till my boards yielded such glow

you'd swear the sun lay buried just beneath the floor.

Older, I turned rougher with the brush, capturing

nothing more or less than I bore witness to.

This blanket of years, sewing such a bleak embroidery,

presses heavy as time rolls, stifling the blaze to smoulders,

Ochre to Raw Umber, then the frightful edges of Bone Black.