ISBN: 978-1-915108-43-2
Published 2 September 2026
58 pages
Lindsey Shields Waters reflects on connections – on love and its memory, humanity and nature, the past and the present – in a sparkling debut collection of poems fluently written in both English and Older Scots. Subtle, complex and rigorously affecting, these poems recreate language for our darkest and lightest hours.
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Beachcomber
Our meeting here
Is our leaving many partings behind
In many other places, elsewhere
—Ko Un
At StAnza you introduced me and another
poet to an American writer as
two of the best up and coming poets in Scotland.
I was embarrassed as only one of us was up
and coming. Your generous spirit warmed me
like the simple potato soup you made
when we visited your island, or the nettle
green sea urchins from your morning stroll
along the shore, brought as a gift for my
children when you slept in the bunk above
them. You told me to experiment. Have fun
with poetry. I wanted to sail to Rothesay
for the final mentoring meeting we’d
planned, to thank you for suggesting
I read Ko Un, for hearing the melody in
Older Scots. Now I think of the wooden
table I will no longer sit at in the church
you were overhauling with your partner,
of you and your gentle Irish wolfhound
walking the beach collecting shells.
*
“In supple English, or in a surprising present-day ferlie of Older Scots, Lindsey Shields Waters fastens and unfastens the knots that bind us, at home and at large, at heart and at risk, aye with a ‘lurch of hope’, despite the cruel fragility of it all.” —Paul Malgrati
“Who the hell in the twenty-first century writes poems in a kind of medieval Scots?
Lindsey Shields Waters does, and this surprising approach makes her best work at once slant and straightforward. What she produces has a tap-rooted displacement that’s to be relished.” —Robert Crawford
“So, this is what it sounds like to make poetry anew and tune into the prehistoric force of language at the same time. With astonishing vividness, the ‘volatile blend’ of poetry that surges through this collection stuns with living minutiae (an unwatered oxalis, pancaikes) as much as surprises with the elemental: ‘it’s a synge fra abufe’. Knottis is a pressing reminder that ‘all livin' language is sacred’ and that all language is living, just waiting on a poet like Lindsey Shields Waters.”—Colin Herd
