Glasgow’s fame as a city of music is legendary: the musicians that it has birthed, the venues: King Tuts, Howlin Wolf and the Barrowlands and The Maryland and Burns Howff to name a few.
Glasgow audiences are loved and commented on by performers the world over.
There are street musicians, songs of murmuration: starlings and blackbirds, rehearsals and studios and those moments of sheer bliss listening to, or performing, that life-changing song.
Our club scene, our classical moments – it never ends in this Glasgow: City of Music.
Finally, the anthology of poetry and short memoirs.
Edited by Linda Jackson
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‘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)
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The 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)
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In this fine first collection of lyric poetry, Goldie explores the contrast between the urban experience - the ravages of post-industrial economic decline, and the liberating, rugged landscapes of Scotland, with a range of precise imagery and deft phrasing that examines the complexities of both, and the relationship between them.
We also glimpse tender family vignettes, which are all the more moving for being set against this wider historical backdrop.
Rhythm is deployed with great skill, and underscores time’s relentless onward movement in Conachair (‘Saint Kilda’s screaming cliffs and stacks,’) and in Sligrachan (‘the screams of ghosts from empty yards/through the pulsing heart of that great city’)
A very impressive debut indeed.
(A Breckenridge, poet)
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‘This is a collection by four women poets: Linda Jackson, Donna Campbell, Tracy Patrick and Lesley Benzie writing about travel and dreams…Each journey is memorably significant to the speaker and evoked in sharp and striking detail.’
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