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
£10.00
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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A first collection of poetry by George Gibson, a writer who writes about musicians and other literary influences in a way that carries their language through his own. From Jazz to the Doors, they are all here.
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Charles Bukowski is a master at writing in a similar fashion about the underclasses but Graham Fulton’s work is better by miles. Not a wasted word and each phrase as carefully balanced as a swaying drunk on a bus.
(Des Dillon, writer)
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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)
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