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Not Dark Yet
Published to mark John Herdman's 80th birthday in 2021. Writers, academics, publishers and literary figures from Britain, Europe and North America came together to celebrate Scottish novelist and critic, John Herdman. The cast of Not Dark Yet are John Herdman's contemporaries and friends, his students and readers. This celebration of John Herdman is witness to the strength of admiration that exists for this Scottish writer's work, a body of writing that extends over a period of seven decades. And seven decades is impressive — especially for a man who is only just turning eighty.
Sydney Goodsir Smith, Poet
Sydney Goodsir Smith, Poet: Essays on His Life and Work offers the first substantial work to assess his life and writings since his premature death in 1975. Considered a major figure in the second wave of Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘Scottish Literary Renaissance’, Smith’s unique body of work has largely fallen from critical discussion of post-war Scottish literature. This book remedies this by showing how his work may have fallen out of favour, and then by reappraising his distinctive and varied achievements in poetry, drama, art and art criticism, the novel and translations. Early career and established academics explore the many strands of his work as the best way of giving this multifaceted literary figure renewed attention.
The Screech Owl Issue 1
The Screech Owl is a bi-annual literature magazine devoted to the best in new poetry, prose, short stories, articles and reviews.
A Working Class State of Mind
Written entirely in East coast Scots A Working Class State of Mind, the debut book by Colin Burnett, brings the everyday reality and language of life in Scotland to the surface. Colin's fiction takes themes in the social sciences and animates them in vivid ethnographic portrayals of what it means to be working class in Scotland today. Delving into the tragic exploits of Aldo as well as his long time suffering best friends Dougie and Craig, the book follows these and other characters as they make their way in a city more divided along class lines than ever before.
The Sinner
Wild, experimental and nihilistic, The Sinner was published just months after the death of its author, Stuart MacGregor who was killed in a motor accident in Jamaica in 1973. Denis Sellars, the self-serving narrator is a restless, suicidal folksinger and would-be novelist. The City of Edinburgh is his love ― his enemies are the forces of progress which seek to make commercial the art and music of Scotland. Rob Sellars, his twin, is a successful folk artiste and has succeeded where Denis has failed; but with the might of right on his side, Denis decides between favour ― wider success as an artist ― and the raging dark side of himself. Strikingly personal and unflinching in its portrayal...
Cairn
Richie McCaffery's debut collection of poems, Cairn, begins in dedication and ends with ghosts - in between lie artefacts and antiquities: a police whistle, a tarnished silver spoon, a bookmark lodged in an old book. These poems find their stories in the overlooked spaces of everyday, and take delight in the unexpected image and turn of phrase. Soaring, short and melancholy, the poems form signposts in the landscape of life, lore and family, mementoes for the buried and the living. Cairn is an understated and quietly-brilliant collection of poems, where each word is tactile and polished like a beach-combed pebble; these are poems you'll want to pocket and treasure.
Scotland’s Harvest
This study is the first exploration of the impact of World War Two on Scottish poets of both the front line and the home front. World War One has always been thought of as a poet’s war, one of horror and futility. The poetry of World War Two, by contrast, has long languished in its shadow, though there was a much greater amount of it written. This book asks whether these poets felt they were grown for war or rather that they grew through war experience, with an emphasis on the possibilities of the future instead of cataloguing the senseless horror of the battlefield. How were the hopes of Scottish poets different from their English counterparts? How was their poetry different, and how did it impact on their later lives?
Passport
Passport - the second collection by Richie McCaffery, following on from his acclaimed debut Cairn (Nine Arches Press, 2014), explores place and displacement, boundaries and borders. At the heart of these poems, McCaffery asks us to consider what belonging is, and how we find our place in life and in language. "Richie McCaffery's poems operate usually in a small compass, but are charged particles: personal - without pushing it in your face - direct, clear and affecting in what they uncover and what they choose to disclose." - Sandy Hutchison
Finishing the Picture
Ian Abbot's life was one devoted to poetry, but at the time of his early death in 1989 he had published only one collection of poems. To the complete text of that first book, 'Avoiding the Gods', this new volume adds poems from Abbot's archives in the National Library of Scotland - some carefully typed and preserved, destined for publication, others found as drafts, handwritten in notebooks - and those poems (ranging from Abbot's first appearance in the San Franciscan counter-culture arts journal Kayak in 1968 to a long standing relationship with Lines Review) published during the poet's lifetime, but uncollected into book form. In his Introduction, editor Richie McCaffery describes his aim as two-fold: to address the abrupt end of Abbot's poetry and to attempt to secure his reputation as a poet - to help to 'finish the picture' of his life and work.
