Bonnie Joann, and Other Poems

These are poems spoken in the living voice of rural Angus, where the lilt of the Scots dialect carries weightier cargo than any polished English could. Violet Jacob captures the rough poetry of everyday life: lovers meeting by the sea, harvest hands singing, the wind off the Baltic bitter and true. Her lines are plainspoken but never simple, finding profound feeling in a tattie-dulie (the woman who picks potatoes) or a bonnie lass named Joann. There's humor here, and nostalgia, and a deep ache for things as they were. This is not English poetry in disguise but something wilder and more honest, rooted in a landscape and a language that refuses to disappear. For readers who crave poetry with dirt under its fingernails.