Published by Bloodaxe Books
The Touch of Time: New & Selected Poems is a comprehensive retrospective, drawing on ten previous books published over the last five decades, including his prize-winning 2010 collection The Breakfast Room, and concluding with a section of new poems.
The new work pursues themes established in his earlier Bloodaxe collections Stolen Light: Selected Poems (1999), Ghosts at Cockcrow (2005) and The Breakfast Room (2010). With what Carla Sassi sees as “his thoughtful attention to small details, his redeeming gaze, his formal control of impeccably constructed verses, and his deep and warm humanity”, he movingly explores everyday events and revelations and how – like our lives and those of our loved ones – they are transformed by time.
“He is a poet of moments and movements … There is frozen clarity, a fragile force of nature revealing the acceptable, concealing the menacing … The wonderful poems in The Luncheon of the Boating Party remain personal favourites. Their contained moments of empathy with Renoir are remarkable.” – Hayden Murphy, Sunday Herald
“Stewart Conn’s The Touch of Time is a welcome and substantial gathering from ten books of poems published over fifty years. Recurrent themes include his delight in daily serendipities, his love of rural ways and his recognition of mortality. His love poems written in maturity can be exquisite (while) his interest in history and myth is balanced by a healthy recognition of contemporary political and class tension. These are among the reasons Douglas Dunn celebrated Conn the craftsman as one ‘among the indispensable poets’ of modern Scotland. ” – Tony Roberts, Agenda
 | Stewart ConnStewart Conn has been called ‘one of Scotland’s most skilled and wide-ranging poets’. His work, with its distinctive rhythmic and lyrical qualities, has been widely published, anthologised and translated. Among its settings are the Ayrshire of his boyhood, Glasgow and Edinburgh where he has spent the bulk of his family and working life; the distinctive land and seascapes of the Scottish highlands and western isles; and regions of France and Italy. Time and again, though, its true arena is revealed as the human heart. Bearing this out is his constant probing of the fragility and interplay of our lives and affections – often illuminating these through music and works of art. His recent The Touch of Time: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) has been described as ‘a welcome and substantial gathering’. Recurrent themes include his delight in daily serendipities and in rural ways, and his recognition of mortality. His love poems written in maturity can be exquisite’ (Tony Roberts/Agenda). Married with two adult sons, he lives in Edinburgh and was from 2002-2005 the capital’s inaugural laureate. He has appeared at poetry festivals here and abroad, and read on numerous occasions at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. He recently recorded a selection of work for The Poetry Archive. |
