‘of shifting light, and changing skies’,
there is poetry all around
Edinburgh Park.

Art adds flavour to a place, it enlightens us as a society, reflects and creates culture, it educates us and awakens all our senses, as a human condition, there is nothing more potent than engaging with a visual aesthetic that speaks to our inner sense of self and how we see ourselves in the world.

Art soothes us and assists in our survival. Whether we as artists use ourselves as subjects; as writers who channel autobiographically, as designers who think outside the box from inside the smaller box, as photographers who capture something of the moment that others’ missed, or as architects who work climate change into their vision; it is the consultants and curators who are the ones that are creative with space, they open up a civilisation of sharing and generate new paradigms, new ways of looking, new ways of holding.

As a poet, at no time did I dream that I would one-day name streets or buildings or a large part of the city, (or appear on TV chat shows) yet it is happening because people are asking for more poetry in their every-day, it helps us feel alive again after being stilled, shook and shoved sideways by all the desensitising media of our year, never has our readership felt it more deeply. But of course, poets are wordsmiths, poets are memory keepers, and we abbreviate meaning from a reduction of wide emotion, history, culture and landscape, so indeed, it seems fitting for a poet to play with that language of giving name and title to things. These things are meant to last, these things are what we leave behind as evidence of how we lived, and we are seeing, time after time, the need for art in our environment to keep our teachings fresh. The Romans wanted their art to be useful, to tell the future generations something of the past. And I think, similarly, Edinburgh Park carries that circumference, there is storytelling in the  environment, each curated creative has depicted something that has a deeper or wider tale to tell and variant symbiosis to share. We are not just looking, we are engaging, we are thinking. What felt impossible has now become thinkable.

It is a delight to see the first of these street names now sited at Edinburgh Park – Airborne Place

Murrayburn Primary School pupils attended writing workshops led by renowned poet Colin McGuire.

Entitled ‘Here’, all of the pupils in the class contributed to the poem which explored their sense of their home area. As part of an initiative between Parabola and Push The Boat Out (PTBO), Edinburgh’s International Poetry Festival, a class of pupils from Murrayburn Primary School attended writing workshops led by renowned poet Colin McGuire and created a poem for display on marketing hoardings at Edinburgh Park.

Here

Living here is like the sky roaring
while an astronaut lands on the moon
and clouds make shapes.

Living here is a delicious, layered cake
with lots of different ingredients
that make it taste sweet.

Living here is an ice-cream in summer
that gives you an ice-cream smile
and dribbles through your fingers.

Living here is just right.
It’s more than money,
better than buildings.

Living here is the centre of our universe,
a solar explosion of cheerfulness.
It is a flying miracle.

Phrase taken from Alexander McCall Smith, “This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.”

Designed by DNCO and made by Solas Neon Sign Co.
Size: 5420mm (h) x 3650mm (w).
Materials: Neon, Argon fill; on a steel box sectionframe.