Scottish poet Morag Anderson explores relationships and the damage people can do to each other in her debut chapbook: concealed violence, love and everything in between.

«Morag Anderson writes bold poems of survival charged by constraint and release. Here are lived realities of escaping abusive patriarchs and pious cruelties. Yet these honest, unsentimental poems find joy and lyricism in unexpected places: a defiant note left on a pew, a cherishing of the private 'width of my skies'. 'Pour me over ice smashed / like fallen birds' instructs one speaker to those who will bury her. Reader, drink in: this intimate, invigorating gathering is a tonic to savour.» — John Mccullough, Winner of the 2020 Hawthornden Prize for Literature

“Stark, raw & devastatingly honest, these confessional poems will thunder like a night train through the darkest tunnel of your heart.” — Ali Whitelock, Author of 'the lactic acid in the calves of your despair.'

Sample Poem:

Paterfamilias

When the breadth of your back

is no more than narrative

beneath the tailored twill of your shirt,

when your fingers, gone to driftwood,

rattle and clack against the ancestral

crest of old gold,

when you cannot rise to greet

the changing seasons that slant

across your vaulted ceiling,

when cataracts cloud the clarified sky

and your intended ascension

seems less assured,

may your daughters labour with language,

give birth to books that punctuate

the end of your line.

Morag Anderson

Books