Window on the Garden by Hamish Whyte ISBN 978 1 904211 07 5 Pamphlet h 30 cm x w 10 cm Full colour photographic cover design by Morven Gregor: stunning close-up image of birch tree Fuchsia pink end papers. Window on the Garden was written over the span of one year. This book-length poem charts the simple pleasures a garden brings, the humorous and frustrating encounters it provides, and the reflective ongoing life of the poet as he observes, reads, mows the grass and prunes the trees. The result is a deceptively simple yet enlightening insight into the complex workings of the mind that coexist alongside the delightful ordinariness of daily life. £5 |
opening the ibook this morning found a blade of grass on the touchpad
Short-listed for the Callum Macdonald Memorial Pamphlet Award. Read the Scotland on Sunday review: This is another beautifully produced volume from the Essence Press. One of those rare books which can be judged by its cover, Whyte's sequence of vignettes snatched from a year in his back garden is both lovely and unsettling. Images of the seasons in a garden, "the daisies enjoying/ their stay of decapitation" mingle with personal reflections on gardening, birds, home life, literature and music, while the outside world intrudes in the form of the 7/7 bombings, the Iraq War and missives from Edinburgh City Council. Impossible to describe, like Joni Mitchell and James Joyce deciding to rewrite Thompson's 'The Seasons' in the style of Sappho, the best way to do justice to this poem is just to read it.
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