This collection marks the arrival of a major new talent in Scottish poetry. Kevin MacNeil’s voice and vision, while rooted in the Hebridean islands, is open to a wide range of cultures, not only those of Scotland – from Gaeldom to urban Scotland – but to the wider European and American mind and, through his interest in Zen Buddhism, to Japanese and Chinese culture.

With astonishing freshness and versatility, MacNeil’s poetry creates powerful connections and new combinations -he has wit as well as feeling, a powerful sense of the past and the local while being resolutely turned towards the future and the cross-cultural.

‘Not only talented and dedicated, he is also original . . . finding and making a literature in the clash and intersection of languages and cultures’
Andrew Greig

‘If you fancy a mixture of dancing logic, loving grace and cosmopoetic jazz, with a lot of Hebridean hootchie-kootchie, including Harris rain coming down in haikus and a skinkling of protogaelic Lewisian gneiss, not forgetting the ever-loving old calidoneein antisysithing, this guy’s got it.
Kenneth White