Adrift

by Ian Stephen

Adrift offers a cross section of Ian Stephen’s nearly three decades’ worth of poetic and dramatic work. His poetry is dynamic and succinct, to the point where I have been tempted to reproduce here, poems in their entireties. His work has its spiritual home in the Hebrides and their surrounding waters. For Stephen, the sea and shore are vibrant, active; landscape is not background, it is interwoven with the author’s own personality. Stephen expresses himself in terms alternately flowing and lyrical, or imagistic and disaffected. He deals as readily with questions of aesthetic as he does with the grimy trivialities of the everyday. The result is, either way, voiced with economy and pathos.

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Ian Stephen is a writer, storyteller, artist and sailor from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. He studied English, Drama and Education at the University of Aberdeen. His prose, poetry and drama has been published around the world and garnered several awards, including the Robert Louis Stevenson Award. He was the first artist-in-residence at StAnza, Scotland’s annual poetry festival. He is the author of Living at the Edge (1982), a book of short stories, and Malin, Hebrides, Minches (1983), a collection of poems.