The Boat Game by Siún Carden
Stewed Rhubarb
The Boat Game moves through a world of ships, ferry routes, offshore rigs, and subsea cables, tracing the hidden systems that connect lives across oceans and islands. Here tourist cruises hover above the wreck of the Titanic, decommissioned oil platforms linger as accidental reefs, and radio signals carry fragments of human voices across open water. From Shetland sea stacks to space missions, from childhood imaginings to maritime rescue channels, Siún Carden’s poems explore what it means to travel, to depart, and to remain.
Siún is a poet of quite remarkable talent and potential. Her work is a concise, surprising and imaginatively bold interrogation of our relationship with both natural and unnatural worlds. Every one of her poems, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, is an event, a happening, an action, not a still life. – John Glenday
Wry, surreal, and always humane, Carden’s poetry is a lightbox to which she holds up the astonishing facades of Anthropocene existence. – Jen Hadfield
Siún Carden’s poems have appeared in journals including Irish Pages, The North, Magma, The Interpreter’s House, Glasgow Review of Books, The Tangerine and Northwords Now. Her work also appears in the anthologies Almarks (Culture Matters) and The Middle of a Sentence (The Common Breath). She received a New Writers Award for Poetry from the Scottish Book Trust in 2024. Her first pamphlet, Tract, was published by The Well Review (Ireland) in 2023. Carden is a Lead Reader for Open Book and a lecturer at UHI Shetland’s Centre for Island Creativity. She grew up in County Down and now lives in Shetland.
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