“a poet of immense precision and eloquence”
– (Osprey)
I am a walker and poet and the poems in Uncommon Place (Shearsman, 2019), explore our relationship with the shifting nature of the places we walk through. Uncommon Place is rooted in Scotland’s mountains and open spaces, its fenced enclosures and mined ground, and develops from earlier books what Tom Leonard called ‘the most intelligent debate between technology and nature in poetry that I know.’
My earlier collections include The Body in Space and Window for a Small Blue Child, a sequence on IVF described by Meredith Andrea as a “coming to poetic terms – in the body, the mind and the ear – with ways in which technology has expanded human possibility”. I have read at Stanza, the Edinburgh Book Festival, the International Poetry Festival of Granada, Nicaragua, and in New York, and have mentored a number of Scottish poets. To arrange readings or workshops contact me directly or through Live Literature Scotland.
“Rooted in the local, the poems in this book deliver a profound understanding of emotions engendered by the geologies and natural histories of landscape and what it means to fully inhabit this country: true dwelling; compelling, unique, enduring poetry.”
– Gerry Loose