Today is my stop on the blog tour for Fairy Rock by Stephen Watt and I have a review to share with you. If you like the sound of that, there's more information about the author and a buy link at the bottom of this post. Don't forget to check out the other stops on the tour for more exclusive content and reviews!
Here's what it's all about...
In 2017 Andrew Smith, then Director, now Chair of the Scottish Writers’ Centre, came up with a dynamic idea to run a Twitter campaign inviting poets to pitch an idea and the winner would have a poetry pamphlet published by the SWC’s publisher partner, Red Squirrel Press. Poet, critic, essayist, editor, designer and typesetter Gerry Cambridge, poet Sheila Templeton, writer, musician and Editor of both Postbox Press (the literary fiction imprint of Red Squirrel Press) and Postbox International Short Story Magazine, Colin Will, and myself took part in a panel at the SWC, ‘How to get published’ in October 2017. Andrew received many entries, a shortlist was drawn up, Stephen Watt subsequently won and persuaded me to publish a full-length collection.
— Sheila Wakefield, Founding Editor, Red Squirrel Press
Glasgow is correctly lauded for its wonderful characters and hospitality but at the turn of the Millennium it was dubbed the ‘Murder Capital of Europe’ with sectarian divisions and organised crime rife in the city. Four of its natives have been raised around the city’s Bridgeton area, cultivated by its ill-omened beliefs, and now have to separately find a way to subsist. But one crime family firmly believes in the tradition of torture and a novel way of disposing of its detractors. Who will emerge smelling of roses—or end up pushing the roses up from the earth below?
Review: It was so interesting to read a crime novel set in verse. I love reading poetry, especially modern poetry and so this was such a refreshing read for me. We get snippets of the characters in this book through individual poems and then move back and forth between the narrative and the characters are the book progresses.
I am always saying that I want to read more books set in Glasgow and so this was wonderful for me because it was set among streets and buildings I could recognise and I could really place myself there. If you haven't been to Glasgow, not to worry, everything is described so vividly, you will feel like you have by the time you;re done.
This book does contain a lot of violence and violence in ways you can't even imagine violence being. Because this book is written in verse though it does seem to take the edge off somehow. You get distracted by the poetic language and the figurative sentences and so don't notice the extreme gore and the truly terrible death.
I loved reading this authors writing, his descriptions were really vivid and even when gory, they were beautiful. If you feel like you can stomach it and you want something just that little bit different then I do recommend this one to you.
About the Author
Stephen Watt was born in the Vale of Leven in 1979. His awards include first prize in the Poetry Rivals Slam, the StAnza International Digital Poetry Slam, and the Tartan Treasures award. Notable collections which he has curated include the Joe Strummer Foundation collection Ashes To Activists (2018) and the James Watt bicentenary booklet Horsepower (2019). He is Dumbarton Football Club’s Poet-in-Residence and was appointed the Makar for the Federation of Writers (Scotland) in 2019. He lives in Dumbarton with his wife Keriann and pug Beanz.
Buy Link
@StephenWattSpit
@RedSquirrelPres
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