Scottish Writers Centre The Fields of War Chrys Salt & Brian Johnstone

The Fields of War is an event marking the centenary of the First World War with a broad sweep of contemporary poetry and counterpointing prose which ranges from 1914 to the present day. Two award-winning poets combine to commemorate the wars of the past 100 years.

Poet and performer Chrys Salt reads from her collection Home Front/Front Line (Roncadora, 2013). A dialogue with her son, a Territorial Army paratrooper who was mobilised to Iraq in 2003 and spent five months in action, the poems are interposed with extracts from his letters from the front. Published to mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion, ‘it is a brave, beautiful and a deeply unsettling way of looking again at long-familiar events, as though the mother of Wilfred Owen or Edward Thomas had kept a verse diary during the First World War’ (Andy Croft, Morning Star).

Reading from his collections The Book of Belongings (Arc, 2009) and Dry Stone Work (Arc, forthcoming 2014), Brian Johnstone looks at aspects of both World Wars, and touches on the conflicts in Vietnam, Cyprus, The Falklands and Yugoslavia. His poetry has been described as ‘a revelation’ (Stephen Lackaye, Edinburgh Review), an ‘eloquent mapping of personal and social terrain’ (Sarah Corbett, Hebden Bridge Books of the Month) and as ‘practising a taut economy that gives every word weight’ (Edmund Prestwich, Manchester Review). A highly evocative reader of his work, Brian Johnstone brings his poetic eye to bear on war and its consequences in this centenary year.