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).

In 2007, he was given a Creative Scotland Award for a project concerning dying villages in Europe. He is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Glasgow University, Dumfries; lectures for Lancaster University on its Distance Learning MA in Creative Writing; and is a registered member of the Scottish Storytelling Network.

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Related links

› More about Tom Pow on www.tompow.co.uk
› Tom's Dying Villages project
› Listen to Tom on the SPL podcast

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Books I love

An old favourite
'I was privileged to help in the selection of the unpublished poems included in Norman MacCaig’s new collected – The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon). His late readings were extraordinary – it was like hearing pure speech, stripped of artifice. It’s wonderful to have these poems added to the published works. And, as a complete contrast, Technicians of the Sacred, edited by Jerome Rothenberg, first published in 1968, remains an inexhaustible treasure.'

A new favourite
'Adam Zagajewski and Tomaž Salamun. As someone who was electrified by the Penguin Modern European Poets series in the late 60s, I’ve always loved the dissonant voices from Eastern Europe. Both of these poets are very different, but both their poetries seem alive with the tensions between tragic despair and delight at the sheer unpredictability of life.'

A current interest
'For the past few years, I have been following two interests: the dying villages of Europe, through images and poems and stories, and a speculative poetic biography on the life of Thomas Watling, Dumfries Convict Artist, transported to Botany Bay in 1792.'

Tom Pow, April 2010

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Featured poem

Song XIV

Oh little apple and whither
__are you rolling? Ever further
from the riverside, where she waits,
__as still as a heron, for you.

Oh little apple, will this be
__your last word? There are no last words.
The river flows on, as it must,
__past you and the lonely heron.

Tom Pow
from Songs from a Dying Village, Pueblo Press, 2008
(available through www.dyingvillages.com)