Naranjas

By Tom Pow

Naranjas is Tom Pow’s first full collection, since the thematic explorations of Dear Alice – Narratives of Madness (2009), A Wild Adventure – Thomas Watling, Dumfries Convict Forger (2014) and Concerning the Atlas of Scotland (2014).

Like all his work, the poems here are imprinted with landscapes, relationships and memories, but they also show how encounters with paintings, with reading and with history, through imaginative sympathy, can be transformed into personal lived experiences. The publication of Naranjas, marking Pow’s seventieth year, shows him still writing poems “alive to the sounds, smells, noises and ironies of life,” as Jim Burns commented of Red Letter Day (1996) in Ambit. But there is an urgency underlying the poems in this present work, as they seek better to understand how people live “in the green bone-yards of our world”.