Thank you, Nigel, for this invitation. It’s hard to know what to say, or which poem to choose out of a long sequence of poems about Shetland. I was on the islands for several weeks in the summers of several years both as a geologist and on holiday, and then for a whole month in winter on a creative writing residency. I suppose that, because the winter month was so much more intense for writing, and as I was by myself, the poems that stem from that month are much more poignant for me. In that month I became acquainted with two or three of the active writing groups on Shetland, and feel myself very definitely an outsider when writing about the islands, but it may be that that adds something to the sequence. I hope so anyway.

Unlike my earlier collection A gap in the rain (Indigo Dreams, 2016)…