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    First Nights: Poems
    First Nights: Poems
    First Nights: Poems
    Ebook86 pages1 hour

    First Nights: Poems

    By Niall Campbell

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    About this ebook

    The North American debut of an exciting new voice in British poetry

    The Scottish poet Niall Campbell's first book, Moontide, won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize, the largest such prize in the United Kingdom, was named the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for both the Fenton Aldeburgh and Forward prizes for best first collection. First Nights—which includes all the poems in Moontide and sixteen new ones—marks the North American debut of an exciting new voice in British poetry.

    First Nights offers vivid descriptions of the natural world, and the joy found in moments of quiet, alongside intimate depictions of new parenthood. Campbell grew up on the remote, sparsely populated islands of South Uist and Eriskay in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, and First Nights is filled with images of the islands’ seascapes, myths, wildlife, and long, dark winters. But the poems widen beyond their immediate locations to include thoughts on sculpture and mythology, Zola and Dostoevsky, and life in English cities and French villages. In the poems on early fatherhood, the geography shifts from coastal stretches to bare, dimly lit rooms. Stripped back, honest, and immediate, these poems capture moments of vulnerability, when the only answer is to love.

    Combining skilled storytelling, precise language, an allegiance to meter and form, and a quiet musicality, these poems resonate with silence and song, mystery and wonder, exploring ideas of companionship and withdrawal, love, and the stillness of solitude. The result is a collection that promises to be a classic.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateSep 26, 2016
    ISBN9781400883370
    First Nights: Poems
    Author

    Niall Campbell

    Niall Campbell was born in 1984 on the island of South Uist, one of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and an Arvon-Jerwood Mentorship in 2013, and won the Poetry London Competition in 2013. His work has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies including, Granta, The Dark Horse, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The Salt Book of Younger Poets and Best Scottish Poems 2011. His debut pamphlet, After the Creel Fleet, was published by Happenstance Press in 2012. His first book-length collection, Moontide (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), won Britain’s biggest poetry prize, the £20,000 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, as well as the Saltire First Book of the Year Award; it was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. First Nights: poems, a selection from Moontide with additional new poems, was published by Princeton University Press in the US in 2016. His second book-length collection, Noctuary, was published by Bloodaxe in 2019. He lives in Leeds.

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      Book preview

      First Nights - Niall Campbell

      NIGHTS

      SONG

      What sweeter triumph can there be

      than the match lit in the grain cellar,

      no moon in the dark gallery

      below the sleeping house. It’s better

      when I’m alone—can freely handle

      those older tools for harrowing

      and planting, turn the bent seed-cradle,

      or thumb the axe blade like a harp string.

      THE WORK

      If I have to, then let me be the whaler poet,

      launcher of the knife, portioning off

      the pink cut, salt trim and fat, tipping

      the larger waste off the side of the boat,

      and then to have the poem in the drawer;

      or, perhaps, let it be the poet nurse,

      hearts measured by a small watch, balmer,

      washer of old skin, stopping by the door

      in the night—

      or the oil-driller poet, primed

      for the buried flame and heat, lips to the black,

      aware how the oilfields in the

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