The first half of the 20th century witnessed two catastrophic global conflicts, with suffering on a scale that – thankfully – later generations find hard to comprehend. The full story of what it was like to endure these wars might never be told, because many who survived chose not to speak – or could not speak – of what they saw and suffered. But some could turn to poetry, to try and make sense of what was happening.

When the enigmatic and ultra-cool ‘Big J’ arrives, Robbie Strachan is drawn into J’s intrigue with a glamorous summer visitor, the American sculptress, Xanthe. The affair goes badly wrong and leads to tragedy. The lives of Robbie, Big J and their crowd will never be the same again.

A revisionst and critical assessment of the policies folowed by independent Irland during the Second World War (known as the emergency in Ireland). It challenges the view that neutrality was the only option at all times for the Irish government, argues that the government used the policy in a highly partisan way and undermined Ireland’s diplomatic relationship with the Unites States and the United Kingdom.

Chris Powici’s poems range from the shed door to the back of beyond, from a rain swept railway station to a graveyard on Skye. Along the way he writes about otters, cave paintings, moorland rivers, bird cries and abandoned boats, in search of those moments when the human and the wild rub up against one another and we find ourselves suddenly, mysteriously at home on this “good, wet earth”.

With Scotland as a background, these poems celebrate diversity. Using both English and Scots, they embrace the glamourie enchantment to be found in ordinary lives and in poetry.

In this, his first full-length collection, Donald Adamson explores roots that push in different directions: upwards to the joys of creativity and the celebration of loved ones; downwards to history, sexuality, and ways of coping with human transience petals on a dark road.

The Territory of Rain set in the village in the Forth Valley where she has lived for thirty-three years, goes deeper into the idea of home, exploring the practices of re-inhabiting and re-wilding, and looking again at some of the underlying assumptions of eco-feminism.

Wherever We Live Now includes poems about archaeology, about the creation of a sense of belonging and of national identity, and about how the way we see and relate to the natural world shapes how we see and feel about ourselves and the communities we live in.