The Steel Garden
Poems

The Steel Garden: Poems by Lorna J. Waite (Paperback) (ISBN: 9780956628343)

"It is grittily urban, unashamedly academic, and quite possibly the most committed political and philosphical poetry in Scotland since MacDiarmid (whose work it vividly recalls)... Lorna Waite records the devastation of post-industrial urban communities without portraying them as victims. The people of Kilbirnie are not statistics, social studies or pupppets of a callous economic system, they are a vibrant creative community, expressing themselves through steel and sculpture, stories and music. These are poems about strength, not weakness; they are angry at defeat, not mourning a loss... If the feminist slogan was 'the personal is political', Lorna Waite demonstrates that the political is most profoundly personal, not to say passionate. She engages with social changes, clearances, migration and the class war through her friendships, family, archaeology and, in a profound and fascinating way, through her relationship with hill, burn, mountain and woodland, and with Gaelic... But, like Neruda, Lorna Waite is a poet I can see myself coming back to again and again. Go read it, and tell me what you think. You won't be sorry." Elizabeth Rimmer

"A truly remarkable debut. A plangent, politicised cry from Scotland's de-industrialised core, tribal, feminist and mythopoetic by turns, it confirms the existence of a powerful new voice where the silence of loss once dominated." Robert Alan Jamieson

"In a supple Scots, Lorna Waite creates a way of holding hands with history, a workers' history that needed her to write it down." Valerie Gillies

"Lorna J. Waite's skill with words brings back echoes of the warm, happy and human Blasties that lived and worked in the steelmill." George Smith, ex steel worker and poet.

"The clang of steelmaking has long gone from the Garnock Valley but Lorna Waite has tapped into the molten stream of her industrial working-class heritage to speak with a clear resonant voice of the people and place she came from and the woman she has become." John Hodgart

First poetry collection from a new exciting female voice with first-hand experience of the industrial clearances.

Lorna J. Waite was born and brought up in the former steeltown of Kilbirnie, Ayrshire, in the shadow of Glengarnock Steelworks. She is featured in 100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems, has written on the arts for a wide range of magazines and newspapers and was associate editor of Variant.