The Lightning Tree - Softcover

In this vibrant new collection, Valerie Gillies takes us on a journey across Scotland, exploring the inhabited landscape and the wild places. Locality presides as a powerful motif in a rich world of animals, birds, trees, and legendary beings such as the banshee and the Stone Woman of Craigencallie. Gillies´s verse, sustained by its precision of language and its depth of resonance, flourishes in an exuberance of poetic forms, from lyric to ballad, from sonnet to haiku. Central to the book is the story of the Lightning Tree, an oak in Sutherland struck by lightning. The following spring it recovers and four acorns grow as the tree revives. Gillies´s poetry -with its focus on nature and the harshness of rural life today -gives a rare insight into survival and recovery, into love and legend.