Islander

"The title poem of Islander is an essential definition: not rooted in landlocked blood and soil but connected by sea and distance, and the returning tides of Scotland, the archipelagos of New Zealand and the islands of Oceania. Here is a poet never given to the common gestures of banal defiance but simply slipping away from the traps of rigidity and subscription, attuned to the ancient laws of movement and sensitive to the uncertainties, the vulnerable truths. `Interislander’ takes a specific urgency, a man suffering a heart attack on the ferry between New Zealand’s north and south islands: practicalities and actions demanded of the moment are deftly depicted but the human place in our unfinished history is there between the sea beneath and the enveloping sky above. `The Desert Road’ crosses the country, mapped by co-ordinate points, listening as the darkness falls and languages come out in constellations, leading through the wilderness to strange, `familiar places’. `The inbreath’ takes us to Ardbeg and another waterside with slipstreams and shipping lanes, snow in the mouth and Scotland as no more nor less than another harbour of perception. Lynn Davidson is a poet opening such perceptions and sensitivities, singular, sometimes wittily anecdotal, poised upon latent gravity, eluding both flippancy and weight in a collection that slows time and repays patience with tempered inductions to particular, opening perspectives." —Alan Riach

Lynn Davidson is a New Zealand writer living in Edinburgh. She has written poetry, essays and fiction, including a sonnet series Return to Kāpiti Island published by House of Three Publishers in Edinburgh in 2018. Lynn’s work has appeared in journals and anthologies including PN Review, Sport, Best of Best New Zealand Poems, Essential New Zealand Poems, TEXT, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, and Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World. She is one part of 12 (a collaboration of 12 Edinburgh women writers). In 2016 Lynn spent time writing in a bothy in the Cairngorms on a Bothy Project Residency. In 2013 she had a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, and in 2011 was Visiting Artist at Massey University in New Zealand. She recently completed a Ph.D in Creative Writing through Massey University. Lynn teaches creative writing and works as a learning advisor in libraries for Edinburgh Council.