THE ATLANTIC FOREST
George Gunn
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These poems are like tetchy watercolours, uneasy with what they portray and with what they want to see. Both divided and connected by the ocean of the imagination, the cultural history of Caithness twists around itself like a vine of peat around a tree – some ancient pine deposited in the vast flow country of the north as if it were waiting for that certainty of unification contained within its black bark so that it can breathe in the future and be reborn. What Derek Walcott has called “cornucopias disgorging stone fruit,’ the themes of these poems re-seed themselves in the flagstone fields of the Old Testament, in the meditations on war and waste, the celebration of the rising sun, of Venus, of the moon – each is given its due place with due reverence, as humanity struggles to love itself in the modern world. A poet knows his footprints in the sand are washed away.
Praise for The Atlantic Forest
‘The Atlantic Forest is lean and magical – there is a Gulf Stream of allusion that runs through this book, carrying us from Rackwick to Brazil, from Kildonan to Fallujah. Gunn does what every fine writer must do: he reminds us we are a part of this frail, cold, vicious, beautiful world; that all we need do to enjoy it fully is open our eyes to its majesty and its tragedies.’
John Glenday
'Spare, lean language honed on brittle, sometimes brutal stalks of feeling ... There is a salty, windswept goodness at this collection's "conflicting heart". Scotland on Sunday
'George Gunn has never shied away from risk. His way with words lives somewhere between Dylan Thomas and the Viking Sagas. This latest volume, The Atlantic Forest, comes rooted in his own native Caithness background, but sails out, as the title suggests, into many landfalls, some real, others mythic. His first line walks into a Valkyrie of rain and many such lyrical flourishes thread through the book. George Gunn's poetry has always sustained a radical questioning outlook ... traversing history, current international conflicts and the state of Scottish theatre.'
Aonghas Macneacail, The Herald
About George Gunn
George Gunn was born in Thurso, Caithness, where in 1996 he returned to live and work with the Grey Coast Theatre Company, of which he is the Artistic Director. He is well-known for his stage plays, and has had several collections of poems published, the last being The Atlantic Forest (Two Ravens Press, 2008). In 2003 he received a Royal Literary Fund award, and in 2006 a Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary.
An extract from The Atlantic Forest
JUST AS THE FULMAR SAID
I care little for the regiments of the dead
although soon enough I will join them
but let them keep their military rows
their tidy quilt patches of memory & grief
eternity needs no walls
let me dance with my sister flame
into the ashes of the night
there I will be with those
who move forever towards the light
where the timeless sandstone
nuzzles into the sea
here I ran upon Dwarick Head
so now as in the past
scatter me, just as the fulmar said
Bury me not where nothing grows
& never blows the wind
turning every daylong page
a year in the making
then in an instant is gone the age
& all remain to savour simply nothing
I will free you of that
so you can read Dunnet Bay
as if the sea were freshly rhymed
with all the colours painted new
& never is unknown
where fish & seals & seabirds fly
through the flaming fingers of a life
lived beneath these cliffs of blood, this sky
