Desperate Fishwives

For Lindsay Macgregor, language is landscape, and in these beautifully observed encounters with the natural world, she restores to us a past we thought lost. Her poems have the music and rhythmic energy of waves, and displalyl an extraordinary breadth of knowledge, whether of Scottish history, paleontology, bird behaviour, art or the word hoard. All kinds of language are taken out, shaken up, and arrive fresh and sparkling: ironic, humorous, formally daring, her poems awaken, scald and entrance, but are always deeply serious: she commands us to "search / for the meaning of loss in the lichen, soft shifts / in the ptarmigan's compass, the angle of cavities." Macgretor uses all the tools language affords, and more, to let us feel the paradigm shift in these seemingly small events. (Anna Crowe)