RUNNING WITH A SNOW LEOPARD Pamela Beasant
For Pamela Beasant's author page, please click here.
A first full collection from Orkney poet and George Mackay Brown fellow Pamela Beasant.
Praise for Running with a Snow Leopard:
'This ... full-length collection shows what a precise and attentive poet she's become... There's no sentimentality in Beasant's work, as befits the first George Mackay Brown Writing Fellow. That great poet of the Orkneys never wrote a sentimental word in his life and I think he would be proud of this collection.' Piers Plowright, Camden New Journal
‘Pam Beasant writes about landscape, especially Orkney but also elsewhere, in such palpable terms that you can feel the particular light of the curious conversation she so eloquently describes between sea and sky, sea and land, sea, sky and land (because all are quite different) in such a way that you feel you are there. She writes about her husband, her children, her own feelings with intrinsic purity – and, more importantly, simple craft, so that we see into her life as a mirror of our own. We feel it poignantly as she experiences it, and can take it into our own lives … We are left with a deep sense that in the end, there is only all of us, looking at land-, sea- and sky-scape, our society and ourselves, joining hands in a search for the truth.’ Joy Hendry
‘Breathtakingly evocative detail ... unabashed spontaneity – and sheer musicality.’ Stewart Conn, former Edinburgh Makar
‘Pamela Beasant expresses the mysterious and intangible with an elegant lyricism and linguistic precision. These marvellous poems are both spare and evocative, always with intensity of feeling and fine metrical control.’
Dr Penny Fielding, University of Edinburgh
About Pamela Beasant
Pamela Beasant, originally from Glasgow, now lives and works in Stromness, Orkney. She has been published widely as a poet and has written many books for children. In 2006, her play, A Hamnavoe Man, was performed at the St Magnus Festival. Her biographical study of Orcadian artist Stanley Cursiter was published in 2007 by the Orkney Museum, and she is working on the final edit of her first novel and a libretto for an opera in collaboration with composer Gemma McGregor. In January 2007, Pamela was appointed as the first George Mackay Brown Writing Fellow. Running With a Snow Leopard is her first full-length collection of poetry.
An extract from Running with a Snow Leopard
Fishing
I can't write you out,
form an edge with words,
pull you from my body.
Instead, I sit with a hook in my brain
trying to catch a bit as you flash past.
Sometimes I reel in
a smile; the shape of a hand; pipesmoke.
