Crossing the Minch

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These poems are concerned in one way or another by encounters the Outer Hebrides and its landscapes, inspired by summers spent there since childhood, and chart an inner journey of growing awareness of the world as much as the physical journey to reach that destination. The poems range from triple haiku in Gaelic, to reflections on the natural world, fauna, landscape, and the constant presence of the past in form of standing stones, to longer allegorical poems such as the title piece charting an individual's progress towards reconciliation with themselves. A theme that loosely unites the collection is journeys: not just homecomings, both fulfilled and cruelly thwarted, to destinations rooted in memory, but also those undertaken by refugees fleeing their homes today. They describe a journey across the water which is also a journey back to childhood, a journey into memory, into nature and history and prehistory, myth and legend, and a journey to a place where our unreliable recollection of the past and imperfect prescience of an unknowable future meet, a lost world and an imaginary world where all paths tangle in a knot of nostalgia and anxiety, a place of loss where something still endures to console us.