What the Sea Gives

Homecoming puts Scotland in touch with the wider world, particularly fitting as the country prepares to welcome back its sons and daughters in a year-long celebration.

Fake news rules the airwaves, AI fills the skies, wheres the information you can trust?

Alan Riachs new collection of poems provides two answers: only in the work of art, whether poem, painting, musical composition, or else in the object of your closest attention, a lover, close family, friends. These gifts you find or dive for, sometimes simply walking on the beach, sometimes swimming deep, into the abyss. There are new discoveries, particular points that make co-ordination possible,and even, maybe, progress. But each of these moments of focus are on the edge, a coastline between land and sea, vulnerable and open to tide or storm, landslide or hurricane, the rising swamp of apathy, the tornado of mob populism. Art can be hijacked. Friends can be seduced.

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