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| Best Scottish Poems 2007 Introduction |
The Poems | Acknowledgements
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The poems |
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Chloe Morrish |
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Not That It's Lonelinessnot that it's loneliness not that it's loneliness not that it's loneliness not that it's loneliness not that it's loneliness From Stolen Weather (Castle House Books, 2006). Reprinted with permission of the author. I wanted to describe a listless kind of loneliness, where time goes by slowly and anything can be stared at for minutes or hours, it doesn't matter which. But really, I hope this poem (which is really a series of linked haiku) speaks for itself. Chloe Morrish writes excellent haiku - I've read her collection - and that's rarer than you might think. (It's an easy form to get wrong.) She has the haiku eye that sees things clear, and the skill to catch the moment in a few simple brushstrokes of language. The sequence is made up of individual verses, each a perfect haiku in itself. (They even, mostly, have the requisite number of syllables, to please the traditionalists!) That the sequence is more than the sum of its parts is due to the repetition each time of the opening line (and title) - not that it's loneliness - which becomes almost incantatory and invokes the loneliness / not loneliness that in Japanese is called sabi. Chloe Morrish writes poetry in Glasgow. She recently completed an MLit. in Creative Writing at St Andrews and has been writing poetry since primary school, when her poems were almost entirely elegies for dead pets. She is a florist, works in a tea house and lives in G12 with her boyfriend. She is 28. |
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