Award winning poet and spoken word artist Bridget Khursheed has published her first full collection of work.
Bridget, who is based in Darnick in the Scottish Borders, is delighted with the relase of The Last Days of Petrol, which is available now from Shearsman Books, all good bookshops and online.
A poet and self-cponfessed geek, she is a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award winner for poetry, and her work is featured in publications including The Eildon Tree, Stravaig, Poetry Scotland, Open Mouse, Fire, The Rialto, Abridged, HU, Ambit, Northwords Now, Southlight, New Writing Scotland, The London Magazine, Trespass, The Shop, Orbis, Valve, Causeway/Cabhsair, Under the Radar and Gutter.
She said: ‘Some people describe me as a nature writer. This is fine with me as I think nature makes sense of the world. Disruptive text, sound art, art poetry, spoken word, scraps, recipes, contextual poetry, peripatetic writing, engineering, hacking, online text. That’s more like it.
‘My interest is in ecopoetry and the teetering intersections between landscape (or the shape of things), nature and population.
‘The new collection The Last Days of Petrol centres on how we cannot imagine that the world as we know is about to change in personal, political or global terms.
‘Summed up in a couple of quotes: one from George Eliot – “A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink; and it is often observable, that the older a man gets, the more difficult it is to him to retain a believing conception of his own death.”
poet and spoken word artist Bridget Khursheed (Photo: Rob McDougall)
‘And one that is included in the collection itself from Hugh MacDiarmid – “It is a frenzied and chaotic age, Like a growth of weeds on the site of a demolished building.” We continue to search for our homes and perhaps that will transform our relationship to earth.’
Edward Waverley, editor Poetandgeek magazine, added: ‘Bridget has a view of the borders and rural Scotland like no one else – environmental precision, ecopoetrics and the loneliness of the commute and lockdown, mix with a rich delicious use of language and humour: she catches a moment where we hold our breath before the world changes.’
Bridget is also the curator of the ROAR stage Stowed Out Festival, and coordinator of Writing Fragments/Fragments project, a partnership between Historic Scotland and Hawick Heritage Hub supported with funding from Creative Scotland.
The Last Days of Petrol is available to buy HERE.
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