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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Replacement Service: Collected Bus PoemsCharles 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.
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Barga: Scottish Poets on Retreat
Dr Linda Jackson set up a Writing Retreat in Barga, Tuscany and the poetic outcomes have now been placed in this small book.
Barga: the town, the families and the artistic community.
It is all in here.
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Love and Other Diseases
Allan's poetry never fails to surprise and delight. In Memory of Waves. he uses the imagery of the sea to invoke intense feelings about ' our eternal now'. He portrays compassion in a range of poetic forms. 'Cloth' is a favourite of mine as he asks 'weave me new' in an extended metaphor. In Lost 'you are the light on the other side of hope' is a beautifully evocative ending.
On the other hand, his prose poems on diseases show his dark humour as they are insinuatingly menacing as he takes on the personas of the diseases and warns us 'I'm not dead yet'.
This collection of poems shows his versatility and skill in the use of language as well as his humour and compassion.
(Ann McKinnon, poet)
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