The Camphill Wren

The initial pleasure of these poems lay in their element of surprise, in trying to anticipate where their dazzling intricacy of word and image, boldness of metaphor and sporadic playfulness might lead, and in yielding to the sense of wonder they evoked. But increasingly captivating are their gradations of feeling, discreetly yet intimately sounding the depths of affection and loss, and our lives passing and rendered, with each reading, more spellbinding. - Stewart Conn Like the painter Turner, he is an architect of thin air, wresting from rain, birdsong and atmosphere suddenly solid structures of memory and moment lit up vividly by language of acute and quirky precision. A sudden slant of very Scottish shifting light will sharply illuminate an image, liberate emotion. Here the domestic and quotidian are made marvellous and very satisfactorily strange. - Liz Lochhead James McGonigal s poems are like the leaves from a long-lost manuscript, with the words their own illumination. There is a tenderness and a humane wit to his observations of the changing seasons, and of the changing people beneath those seasons, and, especially, an intriguing spectral element, as if the manuscript is still haunted by all the readers who ever cherished it as many surely now will. - Richard Price