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Firth

Firth

GARRY MACKENZIE

 

Firth is a poetic portrait of the Firth of Forth. It reaches back into the deep geological past and forward into a troubled future of pollution and extinction, via the boom and bust of the nineteenth-century fishing industry. At that time, government advisors recommended against regulating fishing in the Forth estuary, despite the wishes of fishermen who feared the fish population would be decimated without restrictions on trawling. Within a few decades the teeming waters of the Forth were denuded and the local fishing industry collapsed. The poems at the centre of Firth follow this ecological parable as it unfolds, although the story of the Forth told here covers a vaster timescale.

$28.00

978-1-7390902-6-5 Hardback 120 pages
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Firth is a formally restless collection, moving from haiku and prose poem sequences to ambitious long works on glaciers and oysters. Human and non-human perspectives intermingle in poems characterised by a wide-ranging vocabulary and metaphysical depth. While politically urgent, MacKenzie’s poems rarely preach but rather interrogate the conflicting ways in which we engage with the world around us. In this portrait of the Forth there is beauty as well as devastation; a search for meaning in a shoreline of microplastics and bird flu. The poetry is anchored in one locality but resolutely resistant to parochialism: the problems of the Forth are the problems of waters the world over.

Garry MacKenzie’s first poetry book with The Irish Pages Press, Ben Dorain: a conversation with a mountain, was shortlisted for a Scottish National Book Award and for the Highland Book Prize. His poetry has been widely published in journals and anthologies, including Kathleen Jamie’s landmark collection of contemporary Scottish nature writing, Antlers of Water. His work has been adapted for film and for BBC Radio 4.

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“I know no poet currently practising more gifted, or original, and accomplished than Garry MacKenzie.”
Andrew McNeillie, poet and editor

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About The Author

Garry MacKenzie is a poet and non-fiction writer based in Fife, Scotland. His poetry has been published in journals and anthologies including Antlers of Water, The Clearing, The Compass Magazine and Dark Mountain. He was awarded an Emerging Scottish Writer Residency at Cove Park in 2019, and is a recipient of a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. He has won the Robert McLellan Poetry Competition and the Wigtown Poetry Competition, and his book Scotland: a Literary Guide for Travellers is published by I.B. Tauris. He has a PhD in contemporary landscape poetry, and teaches creative writing and literature. This is his first volume of poetry.

Garry McKenzie

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About The Author

Garry MacKenzie is a poet and non-fiction writer based in Fife, Scotland. His poetry has been published in journals and anthologies including Antlers of Water, The Clearing, The Compass Magazine and Dark Mountain. He was awarded an Emerging Scottish Writer Residency at Cove Park in 2019, and is a recipient of a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. He has won the Robert McLellan Poetry Competition and the Wigtown Poetry Competition, and his book Scotland: a Literary Guide for Travellers is published by I.B. Tauris. He has a PhD in contemporary landscape poetry, and teaches creative writing and literature. This is his first volume of poetry.

Weight 446 g
Dimensions 224 × 205 × 20 mm