Cottage Garden

Each year, the Scottish Book Trust identifies a clutch of promising scribblers as part of their New Writers Awards. Past recipients of these awards have included Gail Honeyman, William Letford, Em Strang and Graeme Macrae Burnet. To mark the graduation of the writers chosen in 2017, the SBT have published a new anthology of their work, New Writing – From Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Award, Volume 9 (SBT, free). Lydia Davis has a number of poems featured, including “Cottage Garden”.

That afternoon trying to keep you we looked for a flame, for a shaft of sun, but there was none.

A glimpse of fox would have done as we shuffled past the standing dead, snowdrops worn out, their petals grey.

The garden groaned to be back underground.