Magi has held three Scottish Arts Council Creative Writing Fellowships and one Royal Literary Fellowship. She has published four collections of poetry. Her sequence, The Senile Dimension, won the Scotland on Sunday/Women 2000 Writing Prize. Her work appears in Scottish Love Poems and Modern Scottish Women Poets (both Canongate), and The Twentieth Century Book of Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh University Press), as well as in numerous other anthologies and literary magazines. Her third poetry collection, Wild Women of a Certain Age, published by Chapman, is now in its third print run. Magi also writes for children.
Originally from Kilsyth, she has lived and worked for most of her adult life near Stirling. She currently lives in Glasgow with her partner, writer and comedian Ian Macpherson.
Wild Women of a Certain Age
My sisters, the time has come
to let your hair grow long and wild and grey,
to cast away the heated rollers and the tongs.
So when the moon is nine months full
let us meet out on our lawns,
let us burn our diet sheets,
let us pound our bathroom scales
to heaps of rusting springs.
Let us shred our measuring tapes,
our Firmer Buttocks videos.
Let us burn an effigy of Cher.
Let us tip our eye creams down the pan.
Let us revel in our pink plump ripeness.
Let us wear our stretch marks like shining honours.
Let us celebrate ourselves – because we can.
For we have bodies that have loved.
We have bodies that have lived.
Mouths that have savoured cheese and meat
and dribbled over chocolate and fruit,
tongues that have tasted good and evil,
lips that have sipped fine wines,
fingers that have stroked . . .
We have been the carriers of babes.
Our bellies have swollen with drumlin curves,
our breasts have hung like ripened fruit,
our teeth have bitten skin and threads.
We have swallowed bitter pills.
We have known dark bloodstains on our hands.
We have been the carriers of laughter and of pain,
the healers of our children’s ills. We have lain
below the stars. We have lain below our men.
Yes, sisters, now the time has come
to claim our bodies for ourselves.
For in our silver hair, our well-filled thighs,
in those laughter lines that crowd our eyes –
we live, we are alive.
Just like Eve
I could have brought you
whisky to warm you on winter nights,
poems full of words to fill your silences
I could have brought you
armfuls of flowers
to fill your rooms with summer,
scented petals to scatter where you dream
I could have brought
olives, shiny, black and green,
anchovies and Parmesan,
Chianti, deep blood-red
I could have brought
figs, dates, cumquats, lychees
tastes to make your senses sing
to set your soul adrift
Instead I brought
forbidden fruit
the one and only gift
you would not accept
Shhhhh….
they found me in the corner
way at the back
of my mother’s wardrobe
at first they thought I was a button
broken loose from a frayed thread
or a mothball, happy in the dark
then as I grew, they thought I was
a shoe without a partner, but
they were busy folk – it was easier
to poke me back beside the fallen
jumpers and the missing socks
as for me, I was quite content
tucked up in the folds of mother’s frocks
from time to time she’d drag me out
wear me, dangled prettily
on the end of her arm – the ultimate accessory
a quiet daughter