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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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)
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Like Nesting Dolls We Are
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The poems come to us as snapshots, scattered and seemingly random, in much the same way that family history is remembered and shared.
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