Reading The Landscape

Brought together for the first time, these are poems about ancestry and addiction, about landscape and introspection, about walking in the natural world and reflecting on our own inner mindscapes. Sometimes meditative, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, they range from industrial Scotland to rural Cumbria and across the North Atlantic, taking the reader through geological and human concepts of time right up to the present moment.

'I loved how accessible, they are, and how true. So much goes on beneath their shimmering surfaces. From a shell-littered west coast beach to overheard stories on a Kincardine bus, Carol McKay's poetry is vividly and poignantly in touch with the things that matter - family, community, a sense of place and of history. These big-hearted, keen-eyed poems understand just how precarious life can be, and how thrilling.'

• Chris Powici, author of This Weight of Light: poems, Red Squirrel Press, 2015.

'Craft without ever seeming in any way laboured, tight but not overwrought. I love Carol's use of the short line; the images she finds right outside her door and on long walks.'

• Donal McLaughlin, author of beheading the virgin mary and other stories, Dalkey Archive.