FIRTH by Garry Mackenzie
THE IRISH PAGES PRESS
Firth is a poetic portrait of the Firth of Forth. It reaches back into the deep geological past and forward into a troubled future of pollution and extinction, via the boom and bust of the nineteenth-century fishing industry. At that time, government advisors recommended against regulating fishing in the Forth estuary, despite the wishes of fishermen who feared the fish population would be decimated without restrictions on trawling. Within a few decades the teeming waters of the Forth were denuded and the local fishing industry collapsed. The poems at the centre of Firth follow this ecological parable as it unfolds, although the story of the Forth told here covers a vaster timescale. 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 book-length poem Ben Dorain: a conversation with a mountain, published by The Irish Pages Press in 2021, was shortlisted for a Scottish National Book Award and for the Highland Book Prize. A section of Ben Dorain was included in Kathleen Jamie's landmark anthology Antlers of Water, and the poem has been adapted for BBC Radio 4. He has collaborated with visual artists and filmmakers, and has published three poetry pamphlets with Clutag Press and Wind&Bones. He is the author of the non-fiction book Scotland: A Literary Guide for Travellers. He teaches freelance literature and creative writing classes online, and summer courses at the University of St Andrews. Writing about the poems in Firth, the poet and editor Andrew McNeillie has said that "I know no poet currently practising more gifted, or origi- nal, and accomplished than Garry MacKenzie."�
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