Christine De Luca was born and brought up in Shetland, spending her formative years in Waas (Walls) on the west side of the mainland. She now lives and works in the Edinburgh area. In 1996 she won the Shetland Literary Prize with her first poetry collection Voes & Sounds.

This book is great mixture of English and Shetland dialect in well constucted poetry which gives a big sample of Shetland life. Here is a typical example.

Gale Warning

Tap the barometer
and the needle falls.

What is more absurd:
a calm voice intoning
a shipping forecast; sea areas listed
in prescrided order,
force 10, veering,
imminent? Or gales

of bleak unreason
thrown up from nowhere:
threats which life's ballast
cannot weigh against?

Instinct suggests
search for its eye
bend to its rage
till it dissipates.

It takes fearlessness
to steer into the wind;
to take the waves head on.

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