Damaris West

Welcome to my website. I'm pleased you found me and I hope you will stay a while.

I'm a British author of poetry, short stories, memoirs and novels. A number of my poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies, and I have three published novels.

Instilled at an early age with appreciation of the natural world, it's still immensely important to me and much of my poetry celebrates it, as do my novels. I always write from knowledge and experience. In fact you could probably tell exactly where I've lived from the places I write about. This includes Umbria in central Italy, my home for more than thirteen years.

Italian was a delight as another Romance language after my degree in French and Spanish - and not just the language but also the landscape and culture, which inspired a series of short stories (Tales from Rural Umbria) as well as a novel, The Wolves of Little Mouse Valley.

My novels explore a range of emotions and issues, from loss and evil to self-discovery and altruism. In some, an element of fantasy is interwoven with the realism. But read them and find out for yourself!

I live close to the sea in Scotland, in a small stone bungalow that was once a stable, with the companionship of an Italian rescue dog, a small cocker spaniel of the type used to hunt for truffles.

As an amateur photographer, most of the photographs on the website are my own. The one on this page was taken by my good friend Lorraine Johnston.



My novels "Wild Goose," "Skolthan" and "Queen Anne's Lace" are available on Amazon as e-books and paperbacks.

Outlines and excerpts for all five of my novels can be found after the pages of some of my published poems.

Night sky images

The new moon is firelight
on the runner
of a rocking chair.
Andromeda lounges
on a couch while
Cassiopeia reads
a novel, knees
drawn to her chin.
Orion sprawls,
hands behind head
and feet on the fender,
studded belt tight
over replete stomach.
The dogs growl
and twitch in their sleep.
The twins are in bed.


But it only takes focussing
on one star, shining
with science, to drag perception
down a shivering tunnel away
from familiar, from myth,
to horror of the unknowable.

Bumblebee nest destroyed

They were probing
where the soil had swamped
their home, fat bodies


tremulous as newborn
foals, pointed toes
scrabbling at the silver


tilth, wings weighed down
with dust.
Could they hear


sounds in the rubble
underneath?
Whirs of panic?


How long
before silence?
What would the survivors


do with lives
free of obligation,
purposeless


itinerant fragments of a scheme
which whole, before,
was perfect?

Outlet

A gull sails
past my winter window.
His fierce eye holds,
like film, coves
of green glass sea,
wind-ruffled thrift atop
sheer cliffs,
rainbows of herring,
curves of coastline mastered
by a single wingbeat.


I go with him,
mount his ivory sides and rise
through smoky mist
hearing his cry,
hearing the sound of space
echo through the room.

To a dog on the operating table

I will take you home, my darling,
my angel, my love, when it’s over.
I will take you home to sunshine,
to grass and gravel, to wind
in your fur, to a thousand
smells and a hundred places
to drink, after the rain,
to companionship, to the goal,
the hopeless goal, of catching
fat green lizards under the lavender.


You will sit, again, and wait for me
by the garden door, and bark
to the dog across the valley,
and corner the neighbour’s cat
in an apple tree. You will carve
your space among legs, and occupy
the aisle beside my bed. You will sleep
and live with us, eat, breathe …
I will take you home, my darling,
when all of this is over.

A Petition to Gulls

Dear Gulls,

                    We love to see you soar
above the sea, above the shore,
but please – stop eyeing up our chips!
We'd like for them to reach our lips
without you fluttering and swooping,
screeching, pecking, snatching, pooping …


Go away! Why should you steal
our suppers for an easy meal?
Tag behind a herring fleet
or pick some winkles. Use your feet
for swimming or to grip a cliff
instead of scaring kids as if
you had a right to grab ice creams
upon the wing, and haunt their dreams.


You may believe it lesser sin
to fish out litter from a bin
but when you make a sorry mess
across the street, you'll never guess
our cunning plans to deal with you.


One way would be – long overdue -
to bring our rubbish home with us
on bikes, in cars or on the bus
which means you'd have a proper diet
even if you made a fuss
or tried to instigate a riot.


We're not daunted by you fellers.

Ever yours,
                    All Coastal Dwellers

Myth

If I should drop my golden ring
while swimming in the sea today,
the shrimps would think the wind had sucked
the centre of the sun away.


Then they would wonder why it fell,
and with what purpose it was sent,
and generations would be raised
to theories of what it meant.

Summer

Let me drink my fill of summer.


Bees, fat bees, and sponges
of dewy roses, grasses
in flower, cows in mist,
the shape of things, the roundness,
smoothness, fullness, spill of things,
saucers of elder blossom,
cups of light in nooks and dells
of walls and boughs, and leaves
against leaves against light, and calls
of cuckoo, and chaffinch, and larks
sitting on spirals of song, and clouds
bulging and swelling, blurring and melting
like waves and like ripples, like shadows,
and the thickness of things, the plushness
of grass and corn, and the sun on them,
dew on them, mist and morning,
colour and secrets in grass and lane,
bright leaf, bright petal, fallen or frail,
speedwell, silverweed, poppy, and light
through glass-thin colours and shell-thin
blades, and the chomp and chew
of a breathy cow, and scents
birthless and aimless on sudden winds,
and trunks and branches in stipple, and cows
in dapple and clover and knee-deep
buttercups wrapping like ripples of weed
through runnelling water, and tunnels of shade,
and flickers of swallow through towers of cloud …


Let me drink my fill of summer;
drink and breathe to store and save
against darkness, against the darkness
of soul that has no season.

Caracol

I took
my own small world
down to the shore with me today,
my rucksack on my back, with the water-
bottle echoing the slap of the sea, and my tools
for netting beauty neatly packed in buckled pockets.
Stones, shells, flowers, leaves, wave-worn bones, pieces
of broken pots, glass, man-made jewels that earth has made
her own, smoothing them, embedding them in her soft flesh:
all went to build the little home I carried, which
seemed to stretch outwards to the blue
of sky and sea, the green of hills.
And over all, like the lofty
apex of a cupola,
sang a lark.




'Caracol' is the Spanish for snail.

Eden after

Myths of golden ages magnify
to cosmic scale our own experience.
Childhood like a magic castle lifts
its drawbridge on our heels, and sends us forth
with such after-taste of bliss that all of life
is spent seeking that lost paradise.


Children have a world within our world:
a microcosm busy and secure
as bees in cushioned fastnesses of flowers.
Days are their coinage: weeks, months, years
mean nothing more than do the sun’s dimensions.


Summer meadows are their forests; trees
make caves for them, and leaves to flounder through,
while high boughs could be painted on the sky.
Butterflies alight at nose-tip level;
pimpernel half-hidden in the grass
is more a treat than daffodil or rose.


But would we change our power for their peace?
Do frogs regret the shedding of a tail?
Perhaps we polish over-much the past:
like antique furniture it gains a shine
when use has worn the texture all away.

'Wild Goose' is the story of Jemima, a bright, serious and sensitive girl who has been brought up by her grandparents in the countryside. She goes to live with her father Leonard when her grandfather dies and her grandmother remarries.

Leonard, a possessive although not uncaring father, attempts to model her in his image as a student of English Literature. Jemima's own inclinations are towards Natural History but her resources aren't sufficient to combat Leonard's influence.

Following a desperate cry for help, other relatives rally to find her the support she needs and a solution begins to take shape.

It's a novel about a well-meaning adolescent who fears rejection, and a blinkered parent. It reminds us how much children can be affected by the vicarious ambition of the grown-ups in their lives, and how their individuality should be sacrosanct.

As Colin Firth says in an interview, discussing the film 'When did you last see your father': "There's something quite narcissistic about ... family love. I want to love you the way I want to. I want to own you. Be like me ... so I can understand you."

When Jemima is older, Leonard begins to attempt to impose his own values on her. He has become more fastidious and less appreciative of her interests.

When she goes to live with him, he gives her a cabinet to put treasures in, but they each have different ideas about what is suitable. She produces what she thinks of as natural history specimens but he sees it as rubbish and makes her throw it away.

As a gesture of rebellion she later took the bag out of the bin and hid it under her bed. Not only that; she added further objects to the collection as she found them: rabbit and bird skulls, feathers, leaf skeletons, pine cones gnawed this time by squirrels (a different pattern), hazel nuts opened by mice, conkers, more fungi.

Hilda revels in the dew-drenched flowers of the early morning near her seaside cottage.

I gathered an armful of flowers: feathery melilot, some white, some pale yellow; bushes of purple tufted vetch; campion; hawkweed. I even broke off a spray of dog roses from the hedge, wetting my nose in the dew held by the shell-pink petals.

'Queen Anne's Lace' is the story of how a family copes following the death of James, the husband and father. It follows Isabel's path, as the new widow, from bewilderment, through clutching at a false certainty, to finding renewed happiness.

At the same time, her three children's own lives are evolving: the blunt, practical Kate marries so that she will be giving birth to her baby in wedlock; clever, handsome Angus comes to know the strengths and weaknesses of his confident society girlfriend; and the artistic Violet lets go of one version of herself in order to catch hold of another.

Isabel and Violet are the peacemakers in the family's frequent spats and misunderstandings, but even they are faced with the ultimate challenge in the person of Kate's father-in-law, the deliberately tactless and offensive Derek.

This is a novel that explores the foibles of humankind with gentle humour and warmth, set against a backdrop of rural landscapes and in particular the family's cottage which is 'just close enough to the sea to give a sea feeling'.

Kate's father-in-law Derek is careless of the feelings of others and has a black sense of humour. He is the cause of much embarrassment at the christening which he has just attended.

Kate and Mike, just behind her, were shepherding Derek along as if he were a small, laggardly boy. Given half a chance, as Kate explained in an aside to Violet, he would be off round the churchyard hunting for the most cryptic and affection-less epitaph that he could find, because that sort of thing amused him.

This passage is the very opening of the book. The photo shows an apricot tree laden with fruit.

Leonora always said it was a shame that the house she’d inherited wasn’t anywhere near as good as the land it was on. They had a large patch of mountainside to call their own, but the stone house on its exposed ridge with its clumsy brick repairs, its leaking windows, its year-long smudges of mould and its smoky hearth were inconvenient to say the least. And then there was that outside staircase, wide open to the elements.

“Look on the bright side,” Ernesto her husband said once. “You can pick apricots from the top step.”

All very well for him to see it that way, seeing as he was disabled and it was never his job to venture up the stairs, slipping on the treacherous ice on a winter's night and being blown inside-out by the wind. Being able to reach apricots in summer was hardly a priority anyway when one year in two there weren't any, and the other year there was a glut they could scarcely cope with. The ancient trees would have swallowed the house if they hadn't been pruned savagely back so as not to obscure the view.

Fairy Rock is a mythical offshore island (based on Ailsa Craig, a real island whose name means Fairy Rock in Scottish Gaelic) where six people lead a primitive life almost completely cut off from the rest of the world. The novel tells the story of how discovery of gold on the island leads to invasion and a re-shuffle of the inhabitants' relationships.

Tragedy ensues, the gold being in large part responsible, but from what might have been the wreck of the island's own brand of civilization, there emerges a strong partnership which ultimately overcomes all difficulties and gives hope for the future.



The first 3,000 words of this novel won First Prize in a competition run by Ayr Writers' Club to which I owe a great deal for encouragement and support in my writing.



The photo is of the real Ailsa Craig.

The passage is from the very end of the novel when the hero and heroine are leaving the island.

“Do we need to have identities in order to be together?”

“You mean from now on? Only if we want to be officially married.”

“Does it matter whether we are or not?”

“I don’t see why. But the one gold coin I managed to chip off could make us wedding rings, if you like.”

“You said it was fairy gold, and we’re not angels ..." Then, almost accusingly, "I didn’t know you’d managed to chip any gold off.”

“I wanted to surprise you. And I don't think the fairies will begrudge us just one coin out of it all.”