Broken Glass, Child Ballads and Demons

Bringing together three of the finest writers working in poetry today, this event showcases a rich counterpoint of voices and visions. This is a rare chance to hear Byrne, Wheatley and MacGillivray each read material from previous and current work.
James Byrne has been described by the Poetry Foundation as possessing 'a razor-sharp wit, an acute intellect and a superb facility with language.' Commending his collection Of Breaking Glass Chris Laoutaris writes: 'Some poetry collections you read. Others you journey into. James Byrne’s incredible Of Breaking Glass takes you on a voyage, not only through the labyrinthine paths of pain and loss, but into a deeper stillness; into something which feels like communion. Byrne’s requiem is a monument. It speaks the voice of his brother, Robin, through the void of finality we thought we could not cross.'

Highly respected poet, critic and academic, David Wheatley is a self-described neo-classical Aberdeenshire Jacobite whose seventh collection Child Ballad, Sunday Times poetry book of the year, was praised by Jessica Traynor in The Irish Times: 'Wheatley's use of the ballad in several poems is masterful, revivifying a muscular form.' A Celtic migrant whose work confronts Gallo-Irish, Gallo-Scots contraband and sympathetic awareness, 'Wheatley’s is a poetry of displacement, uncertainty and sheer possibility…' The Guardian

MacGillivray's 2024 pamphlet The Demon Tracts (Broken Sleep Books) faithfully reproduces the loggbok of Scottish modernist poet, Kristján Norge who vanished from Eilean a' Bhàis in 1961. A satellite work to the 2023 Bloodaxe collection by Norge, Ravage, Iain Sinclair writes: 'The force, travelling across stellar distances from sites where the choke of language is inadequate to a state of possession and delirium unmatched since Artaud, is absolute. Exploration of these pages cuts away slack flesh to reveal the bestial hunger of the alien for a time of natural magic. To risk it is to risk everything.'

James Byrne is a poet, editor, translator and visual artist. His most recent poetry collections are Places you Leave (Arc Publications, 2022) and Of Breaking Glass (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). The Overmind, his seventh book of poems, is forthcoming in October, as is a Selected Poems, Nightsongs, next February. Byrne was the editor of The Wolf, an influential, internationally-minded literary magazine between 2002 and 2017. In 2012, he co-translated and co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012) and I am a Rohingya, the first book of Rohingya refugee poems in English. Byrne is the International Editor for Arc Publications and co-editor of Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Edge Hill University Press/Arc, 2017).

MacGillivray is the matrilineal Highland pen-name of artist Kirsten Norrie. She has published four collections and a pamphlet: The Last Wolf of Scotland (Red Hen, USA, 2013; Pighog, UK) and with Bloodaxe: The Nine of Diamonds (2016), The Gaelic Garden of the Dead (2019), Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire (2023) and The Demon Tracts (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). In 2019, she was writer-in-residence at the Fondation Jan Michalski, Switzerland. Her writing has appeared in publications including Test Centre, Magma, The Scotsman, New River Press, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation, and featured on BBC Radio 3 Late Junction and The Verb.

David Wheatley is an Irish poet living in Scotland, where he is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Child Ballad (2023), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and the Sunday Times poetry book of the year. He has also coedited The Cambridge History of Irish Women’s Poetry with Ailbhe Darcy, translated two volumes of Aifric Mac Aodha’s Irish-language poetry, and published a novel, Stretto (CB Editions), 2022.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton's Close, Edinburgh, United Kingdom