Dynamic first collection from this popular Scottish poet, The Night Jar lifts the lid on a fizzing range of personas, dramas and states of mind - presenting them for our delight: 'I collect the materials of the small hours, / all that gorgeous paraphernalia.' Peterkin explores the expectations and limits of being human with lashings of wit and sometimes a disquieting note of threat. Mad cap, extravagant, urban and questioning, this is a collection no one will forget.

About the Author
Louise Peterkin is a poet from Edinburgh. Her poetry has been widely published in many journals and anthologies. In 2016 she was a recipient of a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust in the poetry category. She is the co-editor along with Rob A. Mackenzie of Spark: Poetry and Art Inspired by the Novels of Muriel Spark (Blue Diode Press, 2018). She is an assistant editor for the long running independent poetry magazine The Interpreter's House. She is a huge fan of cinema, particular horror and old Hollywood films and she works full time as a Library Assistant for the University of Edinburgh.

Reviews

A lively, ambitious first collection with, already, a voice of its own and plenty to say.

-- Sheenagh Pugh

Louise Peterkin's The Night Jar contains poems that are incantatory and dreamlike but always bordering on nightmares ... What is most striking about Peterkin's approach is that often she draws her cues for poems from popular culture or fairy tales. This is nothing new, but most poets are praised for seeing the extraordinary in the quotidian (vide Larkin). Peterkin inverts this; she sees the mundanity in the fantasy, often to great comic effect.

-- Richie McCaffery * Northwords *



Book Information
ISBN 9781784632168
Author Louise Peterkin
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Salt Publishing
Publisher Salt Publishing
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 7mm