William Wall’s new collection, Ghost Estate, takes its title from lonely places: the large, half-finished ‘ghost estate’ housing schemes of Ireland. First started during the height of the Celtic Tiger Boom, the economic collapse left them as unfinished and largely uninhabited chilling and empty spaces. Wall mirrors these qualities here. His sentences are carefully minimalist; Read More
Inspired by the Scottish Homecoming celebrations of 2009 which, amongst other things, marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of Rabbie Burns, Thi 20:09 presents the boisterous tale of “A bus fu we past generations that huv shaped oor nation”. It is Dundonian poet Mark Thompson’s second poetry collection, following on from Bardfaethi Building Site Read More
Kofi Anyidoho’s The Place We Call Home and Other Poems is a musical composition in three movements; a lyrical dance to a throbbing drumbeat and a painfully truthful examination of history, ancestry and regret. It provides a patriotic cultural insight into Africa yet does not shirk from, nor seek to glorify, reality and hurt. It Read More
Confucius said that “To love a thing means wanting it to live.” This fearless collection of poetry by Julian Stannard provides a living, breathing body of uncompromising work that grows off the page and flowers into the large and small places of life, touching and resonating as it branches outwards, and then out some more. Read More
Men and Women Alone is the first of Argentinian poet Tamara Kamenszain’s collections to be translated into English. It marks yet another accomplishment in the diverse life of this poet. Her career ranges from the study of philosophy, working as a journalist, to the collection of numerous poetry prizes. Originally from Argentina, Kamenzain has published Read More
In his day job, Richard Watt writes journalistic prose for a Scottish daily newspaper. In his poetry, by contrast, we encounter a creative, dynamic wordsmith. His pamphlet, The Golem, contains nineteen poems. Some, such as “Bachelor” and “The Old Country” deal with personal regret, while others take on a broader outlook, exploring man’s relationship with Read More
Anne Stevenson’s sixteenth collection, Astonishment, examines the everyday in an extraordinary way. Love, nature, childhood and old age are put through her alembic of lyrical compression and technical inventiveness. The opening poem, “The Loom”, marks the beginning of life itself: “ And once my lungs were gills”. The image of the loom shapes both the Read More
Mortality is, of course, a regular concern of poets. How much more pressing might be the need to explore our relationship with death if the poet were born Jewish in 1942? How much weightier yet might that feeling be were he to have sprung from “a long line of rabbis”, and his father, by his Read More
Street poetry, as an art form, is certainly nothing new. “Auld Reekie’s” Robert Fergusson was the pioneer of pavement verse and, since then, the trend has developed into the wonderful localised material heard and read today. Gary Robertson is Dundee born and bred, granting him the authority and the credentials to comment (often acerbically) on Read More
Douglas Dunn, quoted on the front cover of The Magicians of Edinburgh, describes Ron Butlin, in the inevitable cliché, as “the best, the most productive Scottish poet of his generation”. On the back cover, Sorley Maclean calls Butlin’s poems those “of a man who can think and feel”, adding that “poems come [to Butlin] because Read More