Chiels & Quines
This third collaboration from AC Clarke, Sheila Templeton and Maggie Rabatski, is an unfinished project, cut short by Sheila Templeton’s too-early death. But there is nothing unfinished about the poems we do have here: they are bursting with life and wit, with knowledge and opinion and human sympathy, giving us sidelong looks and some weel-kent figures from Scottish history and engaging portraits of some who should be better-kent; all called up with unobtrusive poetic skill – the most difficult kind – in English, Scots and Gaelic.
Topped and tailed with spare, moving elegies for Sheila from her two colleagues, this is a rich and rewarding volume that will leave you educated, entertained, and heart-sorry that there won’t be another like it.
Judith Taylor
Poet and Editor
Available now
£8.00
Related Books
-
Wanderlust Women: Extra BaggageThe three poets in this collection have a lot in common. They’re gritty, tough, their observation is born of personal experience, not all of it pleasant. That is recommendation enough but there are many moments too of pure revelation. Donna Campbell’s pearls brimming with moonlight that are the bi-product of pain, the stark beauty of Lesley Benzie’s poem about a father’s death ‘Fan she an her sester met their faither’s unbent gaze…’ and Linda Jackson picking up ‘petals of words from smart-dressed lovers’. Such simple beauty is not easily achieved. At its best poetry can be both empathetic and transformative. This is it, at its best.
(Hugh McMillan, poet)
£10.00£10.00Add to basket
-
Barga: Scottish Poets on Retreat
Dr Linda Jackson set up a Writing Retreat in Barga, Tuscany and the poetic outcomes have now been placed in this small book.
Barga: the town, the families and the artistic community.
It is all in here.
£7.00£7.00Add to basket
-
Mongrel
Donna Campbell’s first collection may be called ‘Mongrel’ but it is purebred poetry. Her use of words, especially in the Glaswegian vernacular, combine with images to form brutally beautiful poems about aspects of life that less fearless poets might shun. (Lesley Benzie, poet)
£8.00£8.00Add to basket
-
Looking for Mae West
‘More superb poetry from Donna Campbell. Looking for Mae West pulses with life. Her focus ranges from rural hardship to disappointments in love, from sensual exhortations to fierce castigation. This is what we expect from her now, after her wonderful first collection, Mongrel - in every word you see Donna’s smile, hear her confident assertion.
The thing about Donna Campbell is: she a truth-teller, as much about herself as other people. Her poems are always forceful but never brutal – it’s a good trick that, even when she’s telling brutal things.'
(Charlie Gracie, writer)
£10.00£10.00Add to basket
