Perfect Blue by Kona MacPhee

I bought this poetry collection after hearing Kona MacPhee read the central section of the book 'The Book of Diseases' at the Golden Hour, the excellent monthly music and poetry cabaret evening held at Edinburgh's Forest Cafe.

The whole collection is very varied and includes poems on a wide range of topics, handled beautifully in a variety of forms and approaches. Iubilate is the most moving and beautiful poem about suicide I've ever read and The Short Answer is a very entertaining meditation on the space time continuum and lost car keys.

Of course Crafty Green Poet is most interested in poems with an environmental theme and there are several here.

Pheasant and astronomers enjoys observing a pheasant as the astronomers:

.....can't not watch his colours in the sunlight.
our measures and projections fall aside
as coarsest calculus to his most perfect curve.

A reminder to us to enjoy the wonders of nature, rather than overanalysing.

To a young daughter compares the narrator's daughter firstly with a cygnet and then with a mountain hare who:

.....................................................finds
herself a radiant dissident,
her blue white glow a lonely vote
for somewhere else's winter.

though this winter I feel the mountain hares may have been fitting in better with their Scottish mountainsides than they have in previous years!

This is an excellent collection, with many poems to savour and re-read.