What a joy to have been part of the writers who shared poetry from their collections at Saint Mungo’s Mirrorball Showcases throughout 2024. The team there have a such a strong commitment to poetry. Big thanks!
Articles by Charlie
Review of Belfast to Baillieston: Glasgow Review of Books
Thanks to Glasgow Review of Books for publishing this review of Belfast to Baillieston by the fantastic poet Finola Scott.
The book, Finola says, ‘is an honest tapestry of generations of a family.’
click here to read the review.
Pete Fortune: double launch in Dumfries
I was honoured to be reading, with more than a dozen others, at the launch of Pete Fortune’s two latest short story collections: Waving at Strangers in Passing Cars and A Pauper from Irishgait Tannery (both The Compositors’ Setting Stick). The Coach and Horses in Dumfries was the venue. 
Excellent readings from the man himself and the host of others. Thanks to Robyn and all at the venue. Great place and wonderful words and wonderfully hosted by Hugh McMillan.
The books are excellent: contact Pete for copies.
As would be expected, the party carried on into some kind of chaos soon the sterrs efter. 
Runaway Poets back in Ireland
The second time I’ve been lucky to go to Ireland with the Runaway Poets. On this occasion, we were Neil Young, Julie McNeill, Jessamine O’Connor and me. Neil, Julie and Jessamine are all part of the wonderful Drunk Muse Press, along with another Runaway Poet, Hugh McMillan.
This was a two-gig tour from the east to the west of Ireland: Dublin to Boyle. The Irish Writers’ Centre gig was a launch event for Julie’s wonderful We Are Scottish Football (Luath) and Neil’s The Song She Didn’t Sing (Seahorse Publications). We’d a great crowd there, right in the heart of Dublin, with Jessamine and me as the support act for these two wonderful books. Neil and Julie had a fantastic reception for their work.
The Boyle gig was in the splendid surroundings of King’s House: a magical gig last night with the four of us reading again followed by a wonderful open mic with poetry and music, including from the superb Ivy O’Connor and the fabulous Sinead McClure.
Huge gratitude to everyone who came to hear us in both places, to buy books, to share the craic and to drink in pubs after.Biggest of ups to Jessamine, who, yet again, put the tour together. Here she is in King’s House.
Neil Young on Belfast to Baillieston
Neil Young is a Belfast poet and publisher, living for many years in Scotland. His published works include: Lagan Voices (Scryfa, 2011), The Parting Glass (Tapsalteerie, 2016), Jimmy Cagney’s Long-Lost Kid Half-Brother (Black Light Engine Room, 2017), Shrapnel (Poetry Salzburg, 2019) and After the Riot (Nine Pens, Press, 2021). Neil is the founder of The Poets’ Republic magazine and Drunk Muse Press. In his poetry, you enter into a view on a fulsome, often chaotic space: he elevates the ordinary to brilliant and calms the unbearable to something nearing beauty.
I am grateful for Neil’s words below on my work.
Charlie’s gift is as a poet-storyteller who can crystallise in his evocation of a scene or an incident a breadth of personal, social and political histories. These observations drill into the particularities of the times and character of his forebears – resilient people but complex and contradictory people too who strived and struggled through the intense hardships and discriminations of working-class life in Belfast. This is a painstaking work of memorialising that is written both with sparsity and lyrical verve and – for all its unflinching gaze – shot through with love. A book as tightly woven as the best of Ulster linen.
Neil Young, poet/publisher – Drunk Muse Press & The Poets’ Republic
Belfast to Baillieston – published by Red Squirrel Press
Belfast to Baillieston is a family and industrial narrative that takes as its core the life of Jimmy Gracie, the grandfather of Charlie Gracie. This series of poems and short stories illuminates the harshness and the joys in the lives of this working-class family in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries on both sides of the North Channel.
The lives in this book are unique in that they are Gracie lives, but they are the lives of almost all the people involved in the production of linen and coal and therefore of the vast wealth of their employers. In this honest reflection, Charlie Gracie draws on his own and family members’ memories, detailed research and creative imagination to lay a path from the mid nineteenth century to today. Jimmy Gracie, like many others, felt the weight of international capitalism, sectarian violence and political oppression yet managed to build a platform, with his wife Mary, on which future generations have built their and their children’s lives. Belfast to Baillieston explores how poverty, migration, fortitude and love all mingle to form the wholesome, honourable lives that families like Jimmy Gracie’s create from hardship.
Read what George Szirtes, Annemarie Ní Chuirreáin, Neil Young and Donal McLaughlin have said about Belfast to Baillieston.
You can hear Charlie Gracie reading from Belfast to Baillieston at several places in Scotland and Ireland – see more here.
Annemarie Ní Churreáin on Belfast to Baillieston
Annemarie Ní Churreáin is a poet from the Donegal Gaeltacht, Ireland. Her books include Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017), Town (The Salvage Press 2018) and The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021). She is a co-librettist of Elsewhere, a new opera by Straymaker (IRL). Ní Churreáin is a recipient of many accolades in Ireland and across the world and her work has been translated into Galician, Italian and Lithuanian. Her work in The Poison Glen is of such deep humanity, shedding light on the lives of people lost in society’s dark places.
I am grateful for Annemarie’s words below on my book.
Belfast to Baillieston is a marvellous book about family and transformation. Here are poems that illuminate history from the inside out, carefully observing the realities of poverty, migration and loss alongside quiet, everyday acts of survival. Gracie is a compelling witness. This book will touch your heart.
Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Poet & Editor
George Szirtes on Belfast to Baillieston
Known and widely respected as a poet and translator, George Szirtes’ memoir, The Photographer at Sixteen, centred on his mother’s life, is a powerful exploration of how big history bears down on individual families. In his 2019 review, the Guardian’s Blake Morrison described it as ‘a brilliant, scrupulous portrait’. It is a book that moved me hugely and resonated with some of the themes I explore in Belfast to Baillieston.
I am grateful for George’s words below on my work.
Charlie Gracie’s Belfast to Ballieston opens a window on the historical lot, over more than a hundred years, not only of the Gracie family but also their class. We see events and moments in the specific family’s life, from work in the mills in the nineteenth century, through life in the mines, including emigration, and the Troubles. It shows a time filled with suffering, intimacy, and the early death common to those who worked in those industries. The story is told chiefly through poetry that is close to tongue and ear, the voices alive and spare. It is indeed living people we are facing, addressing us in living language. This is a splendid, deeply moving book, both as tribute and witness.
Belfast to Baillieston by Charlie Gracie – readings
Charlie will be reading from Belfast to Baillieston on the following dates:
Tuesday 17 October 2023: Scottish Writers’ Centre, Glasgow, 19.00 (at the Red Squirrel Press Showcase, chaired by Sheila Wakefield)
Thursday 23 November 2023: Baillieston Library, 18.00 (with Airdrie’s finest, Peter A.)
Monday 4 December 2023: Balloch Open Mic, 19.00 (chaired by George Gibson)
Thursday 7 December 2023: Stirling Central Library, 17.30 (with Moira McPartlin, Chris Powici and Liane McKay)
The Poets’ Republic – Issue 10
My poem, View from Cavehill, 1970, is published in Issue 10 of the excellent Scottish magazine, The Poet’s Republic.
The title of the issue is Poetry as Testimony, so I am delighted that my poem sits in there, with its themes of migration, poverty and witness.
The foundation of the issue in may ways are the voices of indigenous American poets. It is worth spending time reading the biographies of these writers. Their biographies speak of lineage, both generational and poetic. They give an insight into the power of the written and spoken word to frame people’s experiences and resonate very much with writers like me from an Irish-Scottish background. I’m sure it’s the same for others of different heritage.
The launch event for this issue of The Poets’ Republic was on Zoom, enabling poets from all over the world to share their work and listen to others. The event was led by Scottish Poet Lesley Benzie. Lesley’s poetic voice is as strong as any, and her poem John Pilger set the scene powerfully for the indigenous American poets. The poem is one of many she read from her excellent Fessen/Reared collection, published by Seahorse Publications in 2020. Poets like Lesley Benzie, and others in this edition, generate energy that stirs up the puddles.
Alan Riach is Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University. His interesting essay in The National of 14th February 2022 (Culture is no longer the preserve of the wealthy few) discusses the increasing diversity and strength of Scottish poetry. Work by Lesley Benzie is noted by him as an example of this strengthening.
The Poets’ Republic has a desire to bring voices together, with more than bit of an edge. It is home to the Gaelic Poblachd nam Bàrd and affiliated with Drunk Muse Press. In his excellent editorial, Hugh McMillan reflects (with less optimism than Alan Riach) that the hierarchies that dominated theScottish poetry scene in the past still hold sway. ‘This narrowing and exclusivity is at odds with the explosion of interest in and profusion of poetry in Scotland.’
The Poets’ Republic is well worth a close read.