Description
The three poems here, ‘Overtures’ to sections of a larger, book-length work in progress, offer distinctive ways of looking at the Firth of Forth through time, from the deep past, the fishing boom-and-bust of the 19 th and 20 th centuries, to the present and future. As the wider work develops from volcanoes and glaciers, up to microplastics and nuclear power stations, darker notes accumulate, reflecting the ominous state of things in the seas today and at large in the world more generally.
As with Garry MacKenzie’s previous Clutag pamphlet ring-net, these new poems harvest many verbal surprises from the sea, moments of great poetic clarity, resonance, and poignancy. The poems’ materiality, figured in place-names and boats, and bygone fishing gear and practices, delays the inward gaze exquisitely. The work is full of tangible pleasures and while it is modernistically orchestrated on a large scale it never for a moment seems contrived.
I know no poet currently practising more gifted, or original, and accomplished than Garry MacKenzie.
