The poetic voice in this collection is restless, urgent, sad, and knowing. The knowing is a felt knowing, made in what Glissant calls the ‘Poetics of Relation’. We move through the collection across continents and camps, looking into the eyes of despair and consequences of war, insisting that even the lives wasted are not wasted. Insisting of the grief that is life.
Alison Phipps is UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Languages and Arts at the University of Glasgow.
(Pre-order. Available from April 24th 2024)
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‘This is a collection by four women poets: Linda Jackson, Donna Campbell, Tracy Patrick and Lesley Benzie writing about travel and dreams…Each journey is memorably significant to the speaker and evoked in sharp and striking detail.’
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‘More superb poetry from Donna Campbell. Looking for Mae West pulses with life. Her focus ranges from rural hardship to disappointments in love, from sensual exhortations to fierce castigation. This is what we expect from her now, after her wonderful first collection, Mongrel - in every word you see Donna’s smile, hear her confident assertion.
The thing about Donna Campbell is: she a truth-teller, as much about herself as other people. Her poems are always forceful but never brutal – it’s a good trick that, even when she’s telling brutal things.'
(Charlie Gracie, writer)
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'What a welcome second collection from Lesley Benzie. Fessen is a total delight. She melds her native N-east Scots with English in writing which is a keen observation of both the outside world and a close scrutiny of human behaviour and relationship. Her language is muscular, strong, yet tender.
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.'
(Sheila Templeton, Poet)
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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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