All sales from this book will be donated to the Marie Curie charity 

Ruby McCann is a Glasgow based poet active on the Scottish literary scene. McCann’s work focuses on spaces between past and present, evoking themes of love, loss, sorrow, dislocation, isolation, and nostalgia. This is her first collection.

 

 

“The title of this collection drew me in immediately and didn’t disappoint; deep, dark, rich writing, often echoing music riffs, jazz, blues, bebop on a dreich Glasgow night, like a black and white movie... ‘a hollow night/thick with damp sound.’

 

This collection is stunning in its richness of imagery, its wide imagination; such powerful, visceral description. Again and again, a line, a phrase which stayed...‘dark madrigals / howling over a thousand yellow moons’ is magical; as is the lure of ‘a soul adventurer’s heart wearing a side-tilted stetson.’

 

There are journeys, physical journeys, to the US, journeys across that vast country, journeys of the soul, journeys of the imagination, to liminal space...‘now that you occupy/somewhere in between’...and beyond. The adventures of not-knowing, of being un-anchored.

 

Her poems swoop and dive through Celtic mythology, the wisdom of nature, the need for the human race to remember their roots. Her subjects are often women...her mother standing ‘tall like ngetal’, the silver reed which is the 13th letter of tree Ogham; Scáthach, the legendary warrior queen of Bronze Age Skye, described as the very landscape she inhabits; young women, old women, the power and wisdom of the cailleach; an elegy for slain indigenous women and how they will not be forgotten, like Kiran, ‘daughters bloom from branches.’

 

These poems have the courage to look darkness in the eye, to describe unflinchingly, sudden, unexplained violence and yet return again and again to optimism and the promise of love. A promise which draws on the certainty of finding answers in rootedness...‘black scorched earth steers us’, she says in ‘Bending Time’. This is where we draw strength... ‘in the wilderness of isolation / feel powerful awakenings.’

 

This is a brave collection, one to savour, take time to explore. These poems sing of life in all its complexity, from darkness to light, despair to optimism, of the need to embrace all aspects of the human condition... ‘If our gold is not common / will we find our way?’”

 

—Sheila Templeton

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