Tomorrow, We Will Live Here in Gutter
March 13, 2011
Review of ‘Tomorrow, We Will Live Here’ in Gutter Magazine. 
Gutter, features new Scottish writing and has been an exciting magazine to read since its very first issue. Not only have they published my work but this issue features some of my great and excellent friends. In here you’ll find new work from Kirstin Innes, Jason Donald, Rodge Glass, Anneliese Mackintosh, Dilys Rose, Colin Will, Jim Carruth, Brian Johnstone, Andy Jackson, Jane Flett, Brian Johnstone, Cynthia Rogerson, Andrew Philip, Nick Holdstock, Nalini Paul, Doug Johnstone, Pippa Goldschmidt, Ross McGregor, Alexander Hutchison, & Donald S Murray.
If you like new writing from Scotland — you’ll love this issue!
There’s also a super lovely review of Kei Miller’s recent novel and book of poetry both of which I also recommend. If anyone out there is looking for a great book of poems which isn’t mine — go get Kei’s ‘A Light Song of Light.’
Also, while I encourage you to buy this action-packed issue of Gutter (lord knows, we have to support these things) here is a condensed excerpt:
The debut collection by the Scottish Poetry Library’s American-born Reader in Residence is nothing short of excellent. There is a small-town, downtrodden, careworn feel but as Van Winkle bumps the reader along the back roads of country America – and Scotland – his urgent narrative voices rapidly dispel any air of despondency. These are compelling, self-assured, driven poems that shine a longing, elegaic laserbeam at their subjects.
Like a Bill Callaghan lyric, the poems tackle the grave stuff of human existence – love, loss, lust, religion, dislocation (spiritual and topographical), guilt – with a tenderly sardonic, noir-ish humour. Subjects from road kill, a fat boy, through a pastor’s son, deceitful lovers on September 11th, to the rain-soaked wishes of a condemned man are each addresssed by narrators who are edgy, uncomfortable and acutely aware of their failings.
It is hard to determine exactly how Van Winkle’s poems do their work, but they burrow into the reader’s skin like a mite to leave a persistent itch in the memory. The language is clean: WC Williams’ ‘plain American that cats and dogs can read’, but with syntax that is at times polysyndetic and mesmerising: as if a character out of Faulker, Twain or Cormac McCarthy character has stepped off the page to charm, disarm and then shock the reader …. This is a rich, incandescent book to keep at your bedside for dark winter nights.
You can buy ‘Tomorrow, We Will Live Here’ from Salt Publishing.
And get your copy of Gutter from their website.
You’ll find more reviews on my ‘reviews page‘.
Tom Pow was born in Edinburgh and now lives in Dumfries. He was poet in residence at the StAnza poetry festival in 2005. He has published several books for children, and the record of a poets’ correspondence and poems, Sparks!, with Diana Hendry. Landscapes and Legacies (iynx, 2003), his fourth collection of poems, was short-listed for the Scottish Arts Council’s Book of the year Award. Dear Alice: Narratives of Madness (Salt, 2007) won the poetry category in the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards 2009, in partnership with the Scottish Arts Council. His latest book is In The Becoming: New and Selected Poems (Polygon 2009).
By 2030 it is estimated that Europe will have lost one third of its population. It is already an ageing population with a low birthrate. The effect of this demographic change – the greatest since the Black Death – will be felt most acutely in rural areas. In 2007, Tom received a Creative Scotland Award from the Scottish Arts Council for a project aimed at responding in poetry and prose to the social, ecological and cultural effects of demographic changes on villages in Europe.
Rob A. Mackenzie was born and brought up in Glasgow. He received a law degree from Aberdeen University and then abandoned the possibility of significant personal wealth by switching to theology at Edinburgh University. He wrote over seven hundred songs and doubled on guitar and saxophone for cult art-rock bands Pure Television and Plastic Chicken. Despite airplay on Radio Scotland and a rash of gigs in tiny Glasgow pubs, he failed miserably to achieve rock stardom. He spent a year in Seoul, eight years in a Lanarkshire housing scheme, five years in Turin, and now lives in Edinburgh with his wife and daughter where he organises the Poetry at the… reading series by night and works as a Church of Scotland minister by day. His pamphlet collection, The Clown of Natural Sorrow, was published by HappenStance Press in 2005 and 
Tessa Ransford was born in India, educated in Scotland and has lived all her adult life in Scotland apart from eight years working in Pakistan in the 1960s.
I’m super pleased to be reading at this fine event as part of ‘
