Seeing the Light

This new poetry collection from Scottish poet Kenneth Steven captures small moments of revelation or epiphanies, which come unexpectedly as gifts amid the ordinary. An uncleared breakfast table, the sight of someone working outdoors, an old photograph, and the features and sounds of the Scottish landscapes that so inspire his work, all become, in the poet’s words, portals to a greater reality:

‘the small moments
that make up the whole story.
This is the sudden going
through the door into the bigger world.’

Many of them are written in the sonnet form, whose brevity and economy of expression mirror the essence of this book, and whose very form turns from the ordinary to the extraordinary in a moment.