Away: Poems

Andrea MacPherson takes us on a grand tour of Europe, where the vast legacy of human history combines with her own ancestral origins to make a mark on her. In reaction, MacPherson assembles suites of deft, personal lyrics for each country. These poems consider the state of estrangement from the familiar and the shock of history’s impress. Whether she is crossing the uneasy if commonplace border between north and south Ireland, visiting the ruins of a jute mill where her Scottish great-grandmother once worked, stopping for a kir on a ruelle in Montparnasse, or voyaging out by ferry into blue clarities of the Aegean, MacPherson is a traveller always aware of how her perceptions – and her self – are being shaped. In this book of quiet beauty and careful observation, MacPherson seeks to re-invent the travel poem on her own terms.