Gerrie Fellows

Shadow Box originated with a single piece, 'The Curiosities of Dr Hunter', a poem which gathered together many objects from Glasgow's Hunterian Museum in an investigation into the nature of eighteenth-century collecting; but the museum holds so many objects to catch the eye and imagination - cultural artefacts from across the world, scientific instruments, medical specimens, objects of the natural world - from which so many kinds of poem might be written. Here then are poems caught between the perfection of a single thing and a necessary enquiry into how the object came to be here, what its meanings might be, and who comes to be an observer here.

Uncommon Place is a book rooted in Scotland's mountains and open spaces, its fenced enclosures and mined ground. It develops from earlier books what Tom Leonard has called "the most intelligent debate between technology and nature in poetry that I know." Through rivers, weather and wild creatures, as well as through industrial landscapes and urban spaces, the poems explore a core preoccupation, that of how we experience being in place, the relationship of the walker with the shifting nature of the place through which she walks. "Rooted in the local, the poems in this book deliver a profound understanding of emotions engendered by the geologies and natural histories of landscape and what it means to fully inhabit this country: true dwelling; compelling, unique, enduring poetry." -Gerry Loose

This is a poetry of layers and echoes. Poems which bring together people and places - family relationships enacted through webs of intimacy or distance, the dead remembered in interleaved images of art and medicine. These are poems concerned with the living presence of place - and with what is written over it by maps and history, whether in the crash site of a military aircraft in Argyll, in the personal histories of an elegy or in the eroded landscapes of the Scottish hills. Here the living move through time and weather, making and remaking their own language in the music and silences of the poems.