Winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize. Marjorie Lotfi’s award-winning debut collection is a book of two halves, each a meditation on the idea of home, both the places we start and end up in our lives. Spanning a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution, through years as a young woman in America, to her current home in Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.
I
13 Refuge
14 On seeing Iran in the news, I want to say
15 The Wrong Person to Ask
16 Two Grandmothers
17 Maman Bozorg
18 The gun in its holster
19 Riding the Line
20 The Game
21 Crossing the street for mother’s cigarettes
22 Shut Out the Noise
23 Packing for America
24 Hope
25 To the Airport
26 Origin
27 The Last Thing
28 Alarm I
29 Alarm II
30 I Picture of Girl and Small Boy (Burij, Gaza, 2014)
31 II Picture of Boy, Looking Away (Gaza, 2015)
32 Gabriella’s Dream
33 What You See in the Dark
34 Wishbone
35 Correction
36 Destruction of the Forty Martyrs Cathedral, Aleppo, Syria
37 Granddaughter, I entered your mother’s house
38 Checkpoint, Matveyev Kurgan
39 Khanoom
40 The End of the Road
40 i [There’s a moment every morning]
41 ii [Each breath in this place]
42 iii [Every blade against the cutting-board]
43 iv [She takes her boys back every summer]
44 v [Even in this lack of light, she sees]
45 vi [The boys carry her good looks]
46 vii [In her eightieth year, she sees her sisters]
II
49 Sea Gooseberry (Pleurobrachia)
50 Sunday on the Luing Sound
51 Number 9 Cullipool
52 Sun?ower
53 Star of the Sea
54 Williamina Fleming
55 What Work Is
56 Omega Centauri
57 Drift
58 Say It’s Nothing, Say It’s Rust
59 Horizon
60 Out to Sea
61 When They Ask
62 The Trunk
63 After the Match
64 The ?rst thing he doesn’t forget
65 The Un?nished House
66 Storm Light
67 The Last Keeper
68 Citizen
69 Moving
70 And this is how it begins
71 O Love!
72 Edward Thomas on His Last Night with Helen
73 Keep
74 The Hebridean Crab Apple
76 Acknowledgements
Marjorie Lotfi’s poems have been published in journals and anthologies in the UK and US (including The Rialto, Gutter, Ambit, Magma, Rattle and Staying Human), included in Best Scottish Poems 2021 and performed on BBC Radio Scotland and BBC Radio 4. Her pamphlet Refuge, poems about her childhood in revolutionary Iran, was published by Tapsalteerie Press in 2018. She has been the Poet in Residence at Jupiter Artland, Spring Fling and the Wigtown Book Festival, and was commissioned to write Pilgrim, a sequence about migration between Iran and the US, for the St Magnus Festival in Orkney. Marjorie also founded the Belonging Project, considering the experiences of refugees with over 1,500 participants across Scotland, and is a Co-Founder and Director of the charity Open Book. She is an Ignite Fellow with the Scottish Book Trust, one of the 12 Collective of women writers, and Deputy Chair of the board of StAnza, Scotland's International Poetry Festival. She was one of the three winners of the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize in 2021, and her first book-length collection, The Wrong Person to Ask (Bloodaxe Books, 2023) is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.