Table of Contents

• Light Storms from a Dark Country
• Voices
• The Listeners
• White Noise
• Scottish Sonnet Ending in American
• Fallen Villages of the North
• Moving On
• Scotlands
• Nuclear Submarines
• Everyone Will Go Crazy
• The Loser
• While the Moonies are Taking Over Uruguay
• Berlusconi and the National Grid
• Shopping List
• Patenting The
• Bananas
• Scotland
• How New York You Are
• The Look
• Hot Shit
• Slimming
• Girl Playing Sudoku on the Seven-Fifteen
• Homes of the Future Exhibition
• In the Last Few Seconds
• Benediction
• Hospital
• Visiting Hour
• Advice from the Lion Tamer to the Poetry Critic
• A Creative Writing Tutor Addresses his Star Pupil
• The Kingdom
• Married Life in the Nineties
• The Deconstruction Industry
• Hangover Hotel
• Edinburgh in Summer
• Jacko Holed Up In Blackfriars Street B and B??
• My Dentist, Aniela
• Breaking the Hoodoo
• Sevenling (Elizabeth had II)
• Plastic Cork
• Sky Blue
• The Preacher’s Ear
• Holiday at the New Butlins
• Glory Box
• The Scuffle

Promotional Information

Restrained, intelligent, quietly ironic poems, so precise and assured in their craft that they sometimes sail into liquid light. -- Helena Nelson The sluice of news, the creative writing biz and grimly comic crowd-behaviour: Mackenzie is appalled, amused and attracted all at the same time. But it isn't all Desolation Row and the poems here of loss and love pierce through and touch. -- Richard Price Rob A. Mackenzie's vibrant, kaleidoscopic poetry displays a playful, witty and fertile imagination. But sometimes, just sometimes, it dips into a deep reflection on the frailty of our mortality such as in the exquisite poem, 'In the Last Few Seconds', which took my breath away. -- Bernardine Evaristo Rob Mackenzie's Happenstance pamphlet The Clown of Natural Sorrow combined a precise eye with deftness and a good-natured voice which controlled its subject-matter to considerable effect. Those same qualities are present in his collection The Opposite of Cabbage; but these poems are also tougher, often bleaker. Mackenzie is equally unafraid of both Idea and Sentiment, and manages to handle both in poetry which is tight in its formal elements and wide-ranging in its scope. The sense throughout of a life being lived, examined and framed intelligently is enormously satisfying. -- James Sheard

About the Author

Rob A. Mackenzie was born in Glasgow and lives in Edinburgh. His previous work includes The Good News (Salt 2013) and The Opposite of Cabbage (Salt 2009) and two pamphlets: Fleck and the Bank (Salt 2012), which dramatized a bank employee’s life during the financial crisis, and The Clown of Natural Sorrow, (HappenStance Press 2005). He is reviews editor at Magma Poetry and his poems, reviews and articles have been published in Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Dark Horse, The North, Shearsman Magazine and many other publications. Phil Clement wrote in the New Welsh Review of The Good News: “It feels as though the poems are charged, booby-trapped… The joy in reading this collection is found in riddling your own perspectives on fate, faith, travel and death.”

Reviews

Intellectual resourcefulness formal assurance and a copious imagination underpin MacKenzie's intuitive mastery of our post - almost- everything, huge, tiny, sad, happy, global Scottish moment -- Donny O'Rourke Northwords Now