NEW WORKS
IN ANOTHER WORLD : AMONG EUROPE’S DYING VILLAGES
In one of the great defining moments in human history, more people now live in cities than in rural areas, and the effects of this depopulation and the plummeting birthrate are being felt keenly throughout Europe, which has the fastest-declining population in the world. Tom Pow sets out to explore what this means in some of the most rapidly vanishing areas of Europe. From Spain to Russia, he uses the tools of his trade – travelogue, essay, story and poem – to make connections, not only with what he encounters in numerous dying villages, but to reflect on his own experiences of memory, identity and loss. In Another World is an open book: not an argument, but an invitation to remember, to reflect and to engage with one of the most significant social issues affecting Europe today.
Available at Amazon UK click here : In Another World
IN THE BECOMING : SELECTED AND NEW POEMS
Tom Pow is one of Scotland’s foremost contemporary poets; lyrical, celebratory and sensitive to the world around him. In The Becoming, New and Selected Poems, draws on his work over the last two decades, from Rough Seas (1987) to his most recent prize-winning collection Dear Alice – Narratives of Madness (2008). The collection charts his ongoing poetical concerns: an exploration of landscape from the rainforest to the Arctic; an interest in how history and narrative shape our understanding of the present; and, in the new poems, a maturing engagement with those large themes that lie at the heart of Pow’s poetry, namely love and death. In The Becoming offers a timely reading of one of the finest poets of his generation.
Tom reading from ‘In The Becoming’ at its launch in Dumfries at the Easterbrook Hall, Crichton on the 25th June 2009.
Published by Polygon
DEAR ALICE : NARRATIVES OF MADNESS
Tom Pow’s powerful new collection of poetry explores the imaginative legacy of a nineteenthcentury lunatic asylum, the Crichton, drawing on the richly-documented history of the site in fittingly fractured verse. This remarkable book includes the sequence ‘Resistances’ gathered from female patients’ notes, but Pow brings many others within his compass — Nebuchadnezzar, Tom Thumb, Peter Pan, Charcot (Master of Salpetrière, the female asylum in Paris, ‘that great emporium of human misery’), all make an appearance, as do Freud and the Wolf Man. The Crichton Lunatic Asylum was at the forefront of the great nineteenth century European-wide ‘trade in lunacy’ — a period when old assurances were crumbling and our modern sense of the permeability of identity was being formed.
The book is being launched at The Easterbrook Hall, The Crichton on 21st February 2008 and is supported by the Crichton Development Company.
Published by Salt Publishing 2008.