In her mid-20s, Heidi Williamson was part of a Scottish community that suffered an inconceivable tragedy, the Dunblane Primary School shooting. Those years living in the town form the focus of her third poetry collection. Through rivers, rain, wildlife and landscape, Williamson revisits where 'the occasional endures' and discovers the healing properties of a beloved place that helped form her.
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Nights you call out, I pad the hallway to your duvet flung wide, your leg tangling down, tender and crooked
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(@BloodaxeBooks, 30 April 2020, e-book, 80 pages, borrowed from @natpoetrylib via @OverDriveLibs)
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The Dunblane Shooting is part of my history as well, though not as much as it is for the poet. The town is just a few miles from where I grew up. The shooting dominated the news for weeks. I bought the single The Bairns of Dunblane by Eric Clapton. I even read a non-fiction book about the shooting. Not of all the poems in this collection focus on the shooting and the aftermath but a great deal of them do. These resonated with me. The pain of the poet's recollection of grief and the tragedy can be felt in every line of the poems. The other poems in the collection are pretty fantastic as well. This is the best poetry collection I've read in ages.
