New collections to make life more lyrical

...an evocative collection of speculative narrative poetry inspired by a trip to Scotland, where she unearthed records revealing that the country’s most celebrated poet, Robert Burns, once booked passage on a ship to work on a slave plantation in Jamaica.

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It is the poems told from the point of view of Isabella, Burns’ [fictional] granddaughter and the daughter of fellow Scotsman and plantation owner Charles Douglas, in the book’s second part that are most striking and profound. This is also where we see a movement of form from one-stanza narrative poems to more experimental, spacious lines representing Isabella’s inner monologue.