Promoting and supporting the teaching and study of Scottish literature and language
Alison Craig is a writer and reviewer.
According to the blurb on So Glad I’m Me, this collection from Roddy Lumsden is ‘lighter and less inward looking’ than previous collections, his ‘most optimistic and accessible book’ since the Book of Love in 2000. Expecting of this poet some damned good poetry, and knowing that good poetry will always demand of me as […]
The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate is the debut collection for the inaugural BBC Radio Scotland Poet in Residence, Rachel McCrum. Two pamphlets preceded: The Glassblower Dances (winner of the 2012 Callum McDonald Memorial Award) and Do Not Alight Here Again, both published by Stewed Rhubarb Press. Although now living in Montreal, McCrum became […]
Shaping the Water Path is Morelle Smith’s first collection since 2014, and marks a return to the publisher, diehard, with whom she published Deepwater Terminal in 1998 and The Ravens and the Lemon Tree in 2008. Diehard prides itself in keeping poetry accessible, so this collection retails at just £5, about half the price or […]
Vicki Husband’s first collection, published by the sharp-eyed, sharp-eared Vagabond Voices, had me entranced from beginning to end of my first reading. Second and third readings followed, and I was delighted to find new gems glowing in all the poems on the re-visiting. It’s an extraordinary collection, bringing together seemingly disparate themes — space, the […]
This pamphlet, Stephanie Green’s second — and now sold out — brings together poems inspired by the landscapes and culture of the Shetland Islands. Islands and the ways of life of their communities fascinate me, as they do many others, and more so as it seems our lives become even busier, even more crowded, even […]
Santiago is Cheryl Follon’s third collection of poetry. It departs from the previous two, in subject range and in the form of the pieces it brings together. And it is a departure, too, in terms of our more usual expectations of poetry. It is a collection that assembles between its covers the immense and the tiny, […]