Product Description
With language that often reads like stream-of-consciousness but is meticulously wrought, these poems are the work of a restless and intelligent imagination. All of the big themes: belonging and exclusion, self realisation, racial politics and love in all its forms are grounded authentically in the particulars of detail. – Judy Johnson
Know Your Country is a Newcastle noir, a series of insurgent riffs set to disabuse. Shying’s discerning phrasing embodies a ‘go on your nerve’ poetics, where the local, present moment imbued with its past ‘knowing’ is offered as ballast against bogus ideas of progress, like the rubble of Haight-Ashbury dumped in Newcastle Harbour. There’s ‘a male Jessica rabbit’, PTSD, drug dealing, knives, but also sashiko stitch, caramel coffee and the anti-fame of snails.
– Keri Glastonbury
I love the sense of live presence, fit language and big personality in these poems of immersion in the ‘sticky path’ of creaturely existence. Interested and interesting – you can’t ask more than that. – Kate Lilley
REVIEWS
“As the title suggests, these are poems of reckoning…Know Your Country is also a key, a directive, a way out from the morass we find ourselves in. Country is a word that means so many things, from the earth itself with its green rhizomes, to a people/tribe, language, and the way in which we are all connected.” MAGDALENA BALL, Compulsive Reader
“The collection as a whole presents a densely knit weft of landscape, character, voice, detail and sub-text where the poems fully inhabit all of the senses, so as to immerse the reader not only in visual poetic images, but also the smells, sounds and tactility of each scene and place…This is an inspired vision of country on a micro scale. In these poems, the gaps between the words and phrasing are apertures into spaces of entry, gesturing towards what you think you know and what perhaps you don’t know anything at all about.” DANI NETHERCLIFT, Mascara Literary Review
