Dirt

There are all types of bodies.If youre lucky youll find someone whose skinis a canvas for the story of your life.Write well. Take care of the heartbeat behind it. Billy Letfords Dirt revels in the fallow, the tainted, the off , and the unloved. The poems embrace a good life stitched together with bad circumstances, bungled chances, missed callings. Whether loitering on the street corner, poackets ful eh ma fingers, or stumbling from a bar like a monkey in the jungle of traffic, stinking, wild and free, the characters in Letfords poems deliver one thing in spades: heart. On Friday I visit my seventy-seven-year-old granny. Shes smoking a joint. Its not a surprise. Letfords words are lightly worn yet carefully measured; they move between English and Scots, lyrical and concrete, accumulating what the poet has described as an array of textures. Resisting modernitys unearthly glare, it is a life with grain, with grit, rotten with wonder, that Letford seeks. The poems dig for a grace within dirts humble endurance. Theres dignity there. Lay yourself open.