Chrys Salt’s new collection has a wonderful warmth and immediacy- sometimes elegiac, always imbued with humour and humanity. Grass addresses big themes about the value and purpose of poetry through everyday observations of society, politics and family, offering a perfect prelude to the central poem, Weaver of Grass which questions the meaning and purpose of the act of creation itself. Seriously good. Read more

£7.99

‘I was beguiled and delighted by the clear, unfacile fluency of her writing voice....her work will become widely known and loved, popular, because it speaks of past forms in a language so finely tuned it appears natural’ (Review in Ambit of Chrys Salt’s first collection).  

Pre-publication quotes:

‘Chrys Salt’s poems, not least the familial ones, have a wonderful vitality, warmth and immediacy, those threaded with elegy imbued with humour as well as humanity. They are also a perfect prelude to the celebratory sequence ‘Weaver of Grass’ which portrays Angus MacPhee with such empathy and descriptive richness as to conjure up his interior and exterior realities both astonishingly and movingly.’
- Stewart Conn ( poet and first Edinburgh Makar)

Chrys Salt captures the life and the distress of ‘outsider artist’ Angus MacPhee in language and imagery as natural as his materials – grass-roots, hawkweed, husk and seed, moss, buttercup, vetch and thorn – weaving them into an elegiac evocation of the loss and regret he worked through in his long years of incarceration. Her deeply felt and sympathetic take on a life so nearly wasted leaves the man and his creations ‘caught like a burr on cloth / of dim remembering’ bringing him to life in the deepest recesses of our mind’s eye.
-Brian Johnstone ( former Artistic Director of StAnza)

‘Many of the poems in Chrys Salt’s new collection are mini-dramas. They offer characters who come alive for us in a few deft lines; they set scenes with touches of detail and exactitudes of emotion. Chrys is an involved poet, involved unapologetically with individuated humanity and drawing therefrom also a whole view and wide sympathy.
-Tessa Ransford OBE ( poet and founder of the Scottish Poetry Library)

Several poets have been drawn to the elemental and mysterious grass works of Angus McPhee. But none has explored as fully, as Chrys Salt does in The Weaver, the possible connections between his inner world and the work he produced. This is a sequence of boldness and of sympathy; as unlikely as it may seem – and as mysterious - we may call it a meeting of imaginations.
-Tom Pow ( award winning poet)

Chrys Salt’s taut and lyrical verse weaves a moving tribute to the life of Angus MacPhee.
- Roger Hutchinson ( Award winning author and journalist)

Grass: a new poetry collection by Chrys Salt (Pub: IDP July 2012)
ISBN:  978-1-907401-85-5  Price: £7.99

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