Life’s Stink and Honey

Lynn Valentine is a distinctive new voice in Scottish poetry. With hints of fairytale and gothic, she writes precise and poignant poems embracing what is often overlooked or peripheral – a father who drives the snowplough, a childless woman seeking consolation from a Sheela-na-gig. This collection is alive with horses, crows, deer, and as the title suggests, bees; all points north. — Jay Whittaker Enhanced by her apt and confident use of Scots, which glimmers like gold leaf throughout, Lynn Valentine’s poems weave the ethereal with the everyday, and reveal to us a glimpse of the natural and unnatural world we stride and stumble through. From council workers to prophetic aunts, Mills and Boon to the winter solstice, the poems here are full of making do and doing without, of childhood and childlessness, of the grief of loss and the grief of absence. This is a special collection, and a wonderful debut. — Aoife Lyall Lynn Valentine is a fearless writer who tackles the great unspeakables head-on — bereavement, loss, childlessness, exile; and yet it’s not death that prevails in these poems, but rather the sovereignty of life and, with all its gifts and with all its heartbreaks, the obstinate beauty of the living world. — John Glenday