At St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkney, on Wednesday 9th Sept 2026. Poetry and music around the proposed northern telegraph route joining Europe and North America via Orkney, Shetland, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland.

My contribution : a poem sequence which captures moments of encounter in the journey – encounters not just with rock and scree, but with memory, with other voices. The poems are almost entirely extracted from contemporary documents written by John Rae and by others involved in and affected by this brave technological experiment. John Rae himself was a meticulously factual and pragmatic diarist; however sometimes there are glimpses of the man beneath, including of his own religious belief as forged by the bare Orkney land and seascapes, and his occasional weariness for home.

In ‘Aurochs and Auks’, John Burnside describes the eroding, extinguishing effect of the suppression of indigenous, natural forms of expression : “languages, dialects, cultures, public space, ancient pathways, rituals, the life of the mind … time and space themselves are at risk”. The final piece of music, by Greenlandic composer Arnanguaq Gerstrøm, restores us to the real – the actual language, culture and living presence of the people to whom this place belongs, leaving us hopefully a bit more mindful of our own conflicted presence on the ground.

This piece was commissioned by Nordic Viola.

Tickets from the Orkney International Science Festival box office.