Hame

Praise for Hame

Julie-Ann Rowell's touching and acutely observed Orkney poems show how local, everyday

details dwell at the vey "centre of our lives and deaths". In beautifully phrased poems that

sing with an integral music, these poems are suffused in local specifics and language -

Groatie Buckies (cowries), wild and hardy swimming women, swarms of jellyfish, puffins,

hares in the field, and coasting mallimacks (fulmars)- leaving you feeling like you've just

visited Orkney yourself. In a prayer-like poem about the conservation struggle between the

stoat and the Orkney vole, Julie-Ann begs vital questions of how humans live with nature,

while the man-made and natural sounds are ever present in the sonic boom of passing fighter

jets or the hooley of the northern wind. These poems show Julie-Ann's gift to be able to

capture tiny details and open them up to much wider significances, such as a driftwood table

leg that is washed up and 'separated from its meaning'.Resonant and replete new poems

from a poet keenly attuned to her environs.