Richard Myers has worked as a solicitor in England, in business development in Scotland, and as a small-scale farmer in the Highlands, with short spells as a mine labourer and as a ghillie. He lives in retirement in Edinburgh with his long suffering wife, Judith. He adds, “Most of the poems are based on my efforts to do a variety of things. They are nearly all set out of doors on land or sea. I have been concerned about the environment since I heard about ‘Gaia’ in the 1970s”

Farmer-poet Richard Myers draws us into the visceral reality of husbandry with chunky, physical language: words dug from soil, sentences harvested from the fields he’s ploughed, the barns where he’s helped sheep birth, cows die. As a relief, perhaps, from the earth, Richard is drawn to water and writes wonderfully of the sea and its teeming life. What a lovely collection. Humour teases at the margins, holiness pulses at its core. Tim Pears