We travel the world in this new collection of poems from Jenifer Harley. Surging from the global to the local, from Samoa and Sydney to a Scottish seaside bothy, her keen-eyed observation focuses us afresh on human civilisation’s grandeur, originality and beauty. But she’s also playfully aware of the everyday experience of tiny things that irk like the ouch of wearing flip-flops on a steep dirt track.
These poems are always alert to language – or, rather, languages – e.g. ‘la ragazza sooks spaghetti’ (a line from ‘Bar Gambrinus, Pisa’), capturing the vibrancy of a location’s cheerful, chaotic cacophony and colours.
A vividly perceptive collection, commemorative and celebratory, documenting life’s rough and smooth. A collection with real heart.
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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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Invisible Cities 'This collection suggests a presiding intelligence which has seen to the welcome exclusion of the wasteful and sentimental.' (Tom Leonard) Includes work by Janet Paisley, Pat Byrne and Sheila Templeton.
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Linda Jackson’s ‘The Siren Awakes’ is a haunting, heartbreaking and often hilarious dissection of the author’s own childhood and early adulthood; a real world of monster masks, dark closes, dazzling sunlight, love, fear, and, particularly, music. Gentle innocence and sudden cruel violence exist side by side. (Graham Fulton, Poet)
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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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