Garry Mackenzie on Firth

Garry Mackenzie on Firth

Join Fife-based poet Garry Mackenzie for another poetic exploration of Scotland's landscape, culture, and literary heritage. He returns with Firth, a layered poetic portrait of the Firth of Forth.

Firth is a formally restless collection, moving from haiku and prose poem sequences to ambitious long works on glaciers and oysters. Human and non-human perspectives intermingle in poems characterised by a wide-ranging vocabulary and metaphysical depth. While politically urgent, MacKenzie’s poems rarely preach but rather interrogate the conflicting ways in which we engage with the world around us. In this portrait of the Forth there is beauty as well as devastation; a search for meaning in a shoreline of microplastics and bird flu. The poetry is anchored in one locality but resolutely resistant to parochialism: the problems of the Forth are the problems of waters the world over.

Garry MacKenzie’s first poetry book with The Irish Pages Press, Ben Dorain: a conversation with a mountain, was shortlisted for a Scottish National Book Award and for the Highland Book Prize. His poetry has been widely published in journals and anthologies, including Kathleen Jamie’s landmark collection of contemporary Scottish nature writing, Antlers of Water. His work has been adapted for film and for BBC Radio 4.