Dirty Looks

Cheryl Follon was born in Ayrshire, where she grew up. She studied Law and then English and Scottish Literature at Glasgow University before taking an MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin, and now teaches at a college of further education in Glasgow. She has received two writer’s bursaries from the Scottish Arts Council, and has published three collections with Bloodaxe, All Your Talk (2004), Dirty Looks (2010) and Santiago (2017). Her essay on the Mojave Desert was shortlisted for the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing in 2012.

'These marvellous poems are a sustained achievement. They all have a kind of Regency air to them, founded in the context of Burns which they acknowledge, but with deeper roots and associations: Dunbar, the Ballads and ultimately Ovid' - Bernard O'Donoghue. A feast of a book, with sensuality, earthiness and physicality served like dishes never known before, but Cheryl Follon is also bringing old traditions dramatically to life in these scrumptious poems - both wild and formal, with poems that are beautifully shaped and deeply, genuinely dramatic - grippingly so' - Brendan Kennelly.