Tales of a Cosmic Crofter
This is an entrancing read. The story, told in a sequence of poems, of a diligent but burnt-out island crofter who buys a fourth-hand workaday tractor and discovers that, in his hands, it can convert to a space capsule. And he wastes no time in taking off on nightly joyrides of galactic exploration, ‘each whirl a defiance of his ancestry’.
Murray’s gift for storytelling is at full power here, the narrative a roller coaster of loops and bends and inversions; images so vivid they give you a jolt, like the one of the crofter ‘stealing red threads from a sunset’, for a weaver neighbour, ‘to lighten up the overwhelming gloom/of dark twill stretched before him.’
(Maggie Rabatski)
£10.00
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She is interested in everything we know of life...walking on the high cliffs of Catterline remembering Joan Eardley, guillemots...perched on tiny ledges facin intae the scarp/like they hiv come tae worship/at the wailin waa...burnt umber plumage/like oiled velvet...and that final homage... a wee prayer for the coastline/that pressed itsel intae Joan's hairt.'
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The Siren Awakens
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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Barga: Scottish Poets on Retreat
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Barga: the town, the families and the artistic community.
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Unshackled
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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.
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