ISBN: 978-1-915108-47-0
Published 14 September 2026
32 pages (pamphlet)
"Edinburgh is a city of ghosts and Edinburgh is a pamphlet of ghosts. Eimear Bush takes us on a situationist style dérive, a ‘drift in the currents’ of the many layered city, in her first publication. Bush has a fine touch with metaphor – worries are gifted to bats and skies wring pink – shown through a precise and wide field of observation that considers key landmarks and the inhabitants of Edinburgh anew. The speaker, and each person described in the sequence, is an apparition. There and not there. This is more psyche-geography – soul drifting with all souls across the city scape – than the situationists’ psycho- version. Nor is this the destabilizing emotional drift of the situationists, but an elegiac meander that seeks to stabilize and embrace grief. An autumnal elegy to someone lost, that is also alive with the living, and an ode to Edinburgh. This city guide makes me ashamed that I don’t know the city as well as I should. James Joyce boasted that Ulysses could recreate Dublin, Bush’s Edinburgh could do the same for the Scottish capital. Let this pamphlet be your guide.” —Nicky Melville
*
Kitchen Table
Like marathon runners, hermits push through
the pain barrier. Don’t think it comes easy,
all this being alone. I know it doesn’t.
A Buddhist nun once told me, said madness
kicks in around week eight of confinement:
voices, night terrors, regrets, physical pain –
moods gather, abject as a metal bucket
catching rain.
Tonight, I stewed two Bramley apples, stirring
to make sure they didn’t catch. Stirred thoughts of
last May, caught in a web, stuck, constrained,
my reason tangled, sanity flown.
And it will fly again, head south with the
whinchats while the hermit shuffles in,
wrapped in the cape of autumn’s equinox,
to sit silently, stooped and static,
at my kitchen table.
*
“In Edinburgh, Eimear Bush, inheriting the mantle of ‘flâneuse’ from Hope Mirrlees, adds to the chorus of song articulating Scotland’s capital. In a sequence of poems that begins and ends at the poet’s kitchen table in an Easter Road tenement flat, we accompany a woman, bereaved, disconsolate, hopeful, curious, on her peregrinations around the city old and new.
On her journey, captured in a series of poetic snapshots, she offers the reader glimpses of a city with a past, a present and a future. From Montgomery Street to The Meadows, ‘Auld Reekie’ is the star of the show. And she is endlessly photogenic, displaying her urban grit and glamour, pastoral elegance and beauty, in equal measure. Ghosting the sequence is a mysterious figure, one who haunts the poet much as the sequence haunts the reader. Edinburgh is a dazzling diorama of a city, and these poems ultimately celebrate the ‘hairline/fractures running through’ both city and woman.” —Francis O’Hare
