The lightning tree - Valerie Gillies

Valerie Gillies has been called one of the outstanding poets of her generation. In this vibrant collection, she takes the reader on a journey across Scotland, exploring the inhabited landscape and the wild places. Locality presides as a powerful motif in a rich world of animals, birds, trees and legendary beings such as the banshee and the Stone Woman of Craigencallie. And Gillies's verse, sustained by its precision of language and its depth of resonance, flourishes in an exuberance of poetic forms, from lyric to ballad, and from sonnet to haiku. Central to the book is the story of the Lightning Tree, an oak in Sutherland struck by lightning: the following spring it recovers and four acorns grow as the tree revives. Gillies's recurring themes of burning pyres, scorched trees, chemotherapy and fireballs provide a truly fiery current throughout this collection. And above all her poetry - with its focus on nature and the harshness of rural life today - gives a rare insight into survival and recovery, and to love and legend.

From the most violent instincts and frenzied motion, her tone distils a curious impression of stillness and mystery.