Our Tongues Taste Shapes and Angles

This issue celebrates love: love of landscape, language, texture and verse. It celebrates the gracefulness of the mundane and the challenge of beauty. Enjoy some of Scotland's finest poetry.

Gutter Magazine: Aidan Moffat

Gutter Magazine is the outstanding independent literary magazine from Freight Books, publishing fiction and poetry from writers born and living in Scotland. The work you’ll find here is in turns diverse, delicate and dangerous. Issue 14 will focus on poetry, and will be released in March, alongside a digital soundtrack. We have a sneak preview of two included poems, from renowned poet and musician, Aidan Moffat.

Extract from Gutter Magazine (Issue 14) Soundtrack
Poems by Aidan Moffat
Published by Freight Books

Maritime

After the success of his first novel, the much-lauded A Book of Death & Fish, Ian Stephen returns to poetry and his passion for all things marine with a collection that evokes the dramatic waterscapes, rocky shores and wind-blasted textures of his native Hebrides. ‘Absorbing and riveting… dense, compelling and wildly idiosyncratic… splits the form open like a fresh catch, glistening and raw and singing with the sea’ – Kirsty Gunn, Guardian

Extract from Maritime By Ian Stephen Published by Saraband Books

At Plockton In the ebb of pleasure here, embedded in pebbles,

like the keel, settled for winter, anchored by a welter of orange lines.

The continuing causes...

Gu Leòr

‘The wind caught the chimney by the scruff’

Fault Line

‘If it’s rosy fingered it’s brambles or blood’

High Country

‘Our tongues taste shapes and angles…’

Letters to My Mother and other mothers

‘I heard a full choir, Ma’

A Song of Glasgow Town

‘Boast her clear unclouded skies’

Between High and Low Water

‘Safe and unread under hatches’

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