Dynamic first collection from this popular Scottish poet, The Night Jar lifts the lid on a fizzing range of personas, dramas and states of mind – presenting them for our delight: ‘I collect the materials of the small hours, / all that gorgeous paraphernalia.’ Peterkin explores the expectations and limits of being human with lashings of wit and sometimes a disquieting note of threat. Mad cap, extravagant, urban and questioning, this is a collection no one will forget.

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Louise Peterkin’s The Night Jar contains poems that are incantatory and dreamlike but always bordering on nightmares … What is most striking about Peterkin’s approach is that often she draws her cues for poems from popular culture or fairy tales. This is nothing new, but most poets are praised for seeing the extraordinary in the quotidian (vide Larkin). Peterkin inverts this; she sees the mundanity in the fantasy, often to great comic effect.