Scales Dog: New and Selected Poems - Salt Modern Poets

Commendation Quotes: Delightfully digressive, investigative, confessional and clever. Her words hit the page and run in unlikely and rewarding directions that don't seem inevitable even with hindsight. Sometimes they sound like formally framed sparks spinning off a Catherine wheel of consciousness, the distilled digressions of a chatty contemplative. She has a light touch with dark humour, and smuggles in images that make you stop your trolley mid-aisle and re-examine your purchases. I like these poems. I recommend them. Commendation Quotes: A dizzingly inventive and persuasively tough and idiosyncratic collection. Review Quotes: ... a book of manic sanity.--Mike Baldwin "Stride "Commendation Quotes: Charms, incantations, classic satire, contemplation, bawdiness - rumbustious here, elegiac there - Hutchison is a poet of depth, range and magic. Commendation Quotes: Has the ferocity, indignation and bite of the old flytings, even the mad word-hoard of the Admirable Urquhart of Cromarty; a Scots Martial, but with the unabashed tenderness and exactitude of John Clare describing water lilies or Gerhard in his Herbal, on the subject of the Wild Chervil. A mentor, a bristling master, and a total original. Commendation Quotes: These poems crackle and pop and can't stop - they don't seem to quite know where they are going but that's why I love them - it makes them curiously irresistible; it's like a night out, unreliable, celebratory - or would be celebratory if the poems weren't so canny. Right from the start, from the content's yummy titles, from the thrill of the first line - "I've found it helps to carry an egg in my pocket" - so enticing, so obstinate and mysterious, the reader can't wait to read on - (Read on? A book of poems? How rare is that?) Here we find horses fed on hearts, the possibility of being buried in cake, arrows fired (or not) from bedroom windows - fizzy one-liners, dippy references, whacky cinquains. Publisher Marketing: Hutchison is a poet's poet who has been setting standards outside the mainstream, but is now attracting a broader audience too. Scales Dog is a book which ranges widely with invention and delight. It is distinctively Scottish in some respects - but the appeal is international. It has depth and humour to carry its readers all the way through.

Contributor Bio:  Hutchison, Alexander Alexander Hutchison was born and brought up in Buckie, a fishing town on the north-east coast of Scotland. He has worked on and off in universities, including 18 years in Canada and the USA, though he gave up being a literary academic some time ago. As a poet (and occasional translator) he writes in Scots and English. Currently he lives in Glasgow. Based on recent experience he has decided that while wishful thinking doesn't do it, a proper determination can make the cosmos perk up and take a bit of notice. "Mr Scales Walks His Dog," an underground perennial, was composed in the early seventies and drew praise from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael Ondaatje.