Devil’s Piece — Lynn Valentine
ISBN: 9781788641890
£10.99
In Devil’s Piece loss, absence, mental illness and pain are examined with a lens so clear and lucid, the heart aches. Yet in that clarity, there is a savouring of the smallest things and a permeability to love and life that creates songs of what might have been dirges. There is no dressing up of reality, no pretence that everything is well, but in these fearless, precise poems there is transformation. An exquisite collection.
The gift of Lynn’s work is that in her hands the painful is not just painful, the traumatic not just traumatic – she tackles both, changes and transforms, and brings them to sensitive, clear-eyed art.
Niall Campbell
Lynn Valentine’s poems look unflinchingly at mental illness, loss and the everyday burdens of life. And yet there’s always resilience there. Thanks to the acuteness of her observation and her skilful working of the language, she always succeeds in locating beauty, somehow, even in the darkest corners; as if in the heart of things, she alone knows how to find the hidden song.
John Glenday
Lynn Valentine is a poet who understands that poems create spaces in which we gather-up those parts of ourselves sundered by trauma. Like Ada Limón, she knows that the margins in which poetry happens give ground for nurturing questions to help us grow: where is our grief; our joy? In the set-aside of ‘Devil’s Piece’—the unsteadied sand of the opening poem the wrong psychiatrist, in the numerous worlds offered throughout this collection (loch shore, mountain, sea, forests, the loved home, the hospital ward)—we are invited to become emotionally agile, engaged in the constant balancing of our hearts, as the poet herself puts it: ‘swallowing sorrow’ and practicing that hopefulness that is the ‘knack of harvesting light’.
Losses are felt and gratitude is given in language rippled with Valentine’s facility for lyricism and distillation. Here, English and Scots fall in and about each other with effortless clarity, and as sinuously as the alchemic verses in which this poet shifts the shapes of her subjects: humans; gazelles; bears, butterflies. All life is embraced in poems that render luminous everyday acts of opening-up; acceptance, be it at the field gate unclasped for horses, or the poet’s own arms flung wide for ghost dogs; her beloved; dreamed-for children, the wept-for dead.
The loam of this collection is sown with salt as well as ‘fathoms of light’, yet both are broadcast with exquisite care; deftly, by the able hands of a poet who understands we need each to keep us ‘afloat’.
Cáit O’Neill McCullagh
Author biography
Lynn Valentine turned to writing after a prolonged period of poor mental health which led to her having to give up work. She lives on the Black Isle in the Scottish Highlands with her husband, their dogs and a mountain for a neighbour but her thoughts are never far away from her adopted city of Glasgow and her home town of Arbroath.
Lynn is a past winner of the Glasgow Women’s Library ‘Dragon’s Pen’ poetry competition. In 2019 she won a place on the Cinnamon Press Mentoring Scheme and in 2020 won the Cinnamon Press Literature Award leading to the publication of Life’s Stink & Honey, her debut collection.
Also in 2020, Lynn won the Hedgehog Poetry Press Dialect competition which resulted in the publication of her Scots language pamphlet A Glimmer o Stars.
In the same year she was one of five ‘North’ poets commissioned by the Scottish Poetry Library to write a poem for their Champions project.
Lynn’s poetry is primarily concerned with childlessness, family, her working class roots and the impact of poor mental health. She has been published widely. You can find out more on her website or follow Lynn on Twitter @dizzylynn