Scottish poet Morag Anderson explores relationships and the damage people can do to each other in her debut chapbook: concealed violence, love and everything in between.
«Morag Anderson writes bold poems of survival charged by constraint and release. Here are lived realities of escaping abusive patriarchs and pious cruelties. Yet these honest, unsentimental poems find joy and lyricism in unexpected places: a defiant note left on a pew, a cherishing of the private 'width of my skies'. 'Pour me over ice smashed / like fallen birds' instructs one speaker to those who will bury her. Reader, drink in: this intimate, invigorating gathering is a tonic to savour.» — John Mccullough, Winner of the 2020 Hawthornden Prize for Literature
“Stark, raw & devastatingly honest, these confessional poems will thunder like a night train through the darkest tunnel of your heart.” — Ali Whitelock, Author of 'the lactic acid in the calves of your despair.'
Sample Poem:
Paterfamilias
When the breadth of your back
is no more than narrative
beneath the tailored twill of your shirt,
when your fingers, gone to driftwood,
rattle and clack against the ancestral
crest of old gold,
when you cannot rise to greet
the changing seasons that slant
across your vaulted ceiling,
when cataracts cloud the clarified sky
and your intended ascension
seems less assured,
may your daughters labour with language,
give birth to books that punctuate
the end of your line.
