Released 31st March, 2024 // 978-1-916938-10-6 // 54 pages // RRP £12.99
Martin Malone & Bryan Angus's Gardenstown offers a vivid evocation of changing seasons in a village, from spring to winter. The book is a sequence of Malone's remarkable poetry, interspersed with Angus's exquisite linocuts, which capture the essence of the people, places and wildlife in north-east Scotland. Here they watch the year pass as, like the tide the seasons come and go.
PRAISE for Gardenstown:
An Under Milk Wood reimagined by W. S. Graham on a far northern coast, Martin Malone’s remarkable Gardenstown surveys the horizon with a hyper-attuned ear for the seasonal music of what happens. With its vertically stacked houses, the village is confined yet open to the vast panoramas captured by the poet’s unwavering gaze. Gardenstown has grasped the passionate transitory and fashioned it into something tough and durable as Aberdeenshire granite.
— David Wheatley
Paying acute sustained attention to something - anything - is becoming a radical act in our 24 hour non-stop culture. Malone and Angus avoid the tautological trap of poem and image together by both granting similar but different, and inventively accurate attention to the environs of Gardenstown. The whole thing is beautifully sustained. By the time I reached the conclusion with its 'musical comedy of eiders', I believed I'd walked the whole route.
— Matthew Caley
ABOUT Martin Malone & Bryan Angus:
Martin Malone now divides his time between Donegal, Aberdeenshire and France. He has published four poetry collections: The Waiting Hillside (Templar, 2011), Cur (Shoestring, 2015), The Unreturning (Shoestring 2019), Gardenstown (Broken Sleep Books 2024) and a Selected Poems 2005 – 2020: Larksong Static (Hedgehog 2020). He’s also published 4 pamphlets: 17 Landscapes (Bluegate Books), Prodigals (The Black Light Engine Room), Mr. Willett’s Summertime (Poetry Salzburg), Shetland Lyrics (Hedgehog). He is an editor at Poetry Salzburg Review and a Poetry Ambassador for the Scottish Poetry Library.
Bryan Angus is an Aberdonian who now lives in Banff on the north Aberdeenshire coast. For many years he ran an art retreat in Gardenstown with his wife Carla, where he re-learned how to make pictures. His great pleasure is landscape - whether that’s painted, drawn or printed - and finding the stories that are held in the fabric of the land. He currently enjoys making his own work for exhibition, as well as illustration and design for commercial projects.
