The Breakfast Room
Published on 25. February 2010
Book
Paperback/Softback
64 pages
978-1-85224-856-7 (ISBN)
Description
The waif-like figure peering from Bonnard's "The Breakfast Room" instils a sense of mystery and marginality in Stewart Conn's title-poem. Among other portents of transience in his latest collection are two briefly glimpsed duck shooters. Responses to music, tinged with warmth and humour, highlight the redeeming power of art. The book concludes with a group of love poems imbued with tenderness and a treasuring of the here and now.
Reviews / Votes
'The title "Ghosts at Cockcrow" captures the precarious beauty of Conn's work, its departures and beginnings, its lingerings and resurrections - his almost trademark filigree assonances and half rhymes, wry asides and sudden details. Anger, art, angst, guilt and guile, the humane and the human are all here' - Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday.'Ghosts at Cockcrow is a graceful slipping..." as he puts it, into seniority, at once a coming of old age, and an acquiring of senior status among Scotland's poets. It is full of high culture, old Europe and wry self-deprecation, visiting Barcelona, Burgundy and the capital to which he played laureate for three years, Edinburgh' - W.N. Herbert, Poetry London
'He stands among the indispensable poets of modern and contemporary Scotland' - Douglas Dunn, The Dark Horse
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-856-7 (9781852248567)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Stewart Conn was born in Glasgow in 1936 and grew up in Ayrshire, the setting for much of his early poetry. Since 1977 he has lived in Edinburgh, where until 1992 he was based as BBC Scotland's head of radio drama. He was Edinburgh's first Makar or Poet Laureate in 2002-05. His poetry books include Stolen Light: Selected Poems (1999), Ghosts at Cockcrow (2005), The Breakfast Room (2010) and The Touch of Time: New & Selected Poems (2014) from Bloodaxe. His other publications include a memoir, Distances (Scottish Cultural Press, 2001), and two anthologies, 100 Favourite Scottish Poems (SPL/Luath Press, 2006), a TLS Christmas choice, and 100 Favourite Scottish Love Poems (Luath Press, 2008). He has won three Scottish Arts Council book awards, travel awards from the Society of Authors and the English-Speaking Union, and the Institute of Contemporary Scotland's first Iain Crichton Smith award for services to literature. An Ear to the Ground was a Poetry Book Society Choice, Stolen Light was shortlisted for Saltire Scottish Book of the Year, and The Breakfast Room won the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards Poetry Book of the Year Prize.