Three Ways of Looking at the Forth

Hello Friends

I’m delighted to share with you a recent conversation with Fife-based award-winning poet and nonfiction author Garry Mackenzie, who also read from his recent poetry pamphlet “Three ways of Looking at the Forth” just published by Clutag Press, and shared some brand new poems that will form part of his next publication “Firth” (Irish Pages Press, forthcoming 2025).

We talked about how poetry can hold space for the complex, contradictory and insoluble predicaments of our times, about place as an endlessly shifting set of relationships, and how water embodies deep time in a material form.

(Apologies for my dodgy island internet connection - my video does a bit of buffering at the start but it soon settles down!)

Also be sure to check out Garry’s earlier publication “Ben Dorain, a conversation with a mountain”, a book-length poem that was published in 2021 by Irish Pages Press to well-deserved acclaim.

With our shared fascination with what water can teach us, I’m very much looking forward to seeing Garry’s new body of work brought together in “Firth” next year. If “Ben Dorain” is anything to go by, we are in for a treat.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did!

Links!

You can find out more about Garry’s writing and teaching on his website.

Other books we mention in our conversation are:

Joseph Meeker “The Comedy of Survival: In search of an environmental ethic”

Alice Oswald “Dart”

Dougald Hine “At Work in the Ruins: Finding our Place in the time of climate change and other emergencies”

Donna Harraway “Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene”

Clutag Press “Archipelago” journal

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May you find this week plain sailing!

- Sam