Dirt

Billy Letford's 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 fi ngers', or stumbling from a bar 'like a monkey in the jungle of traffi c, stinking, wild and free', the characters in Letford's poems deliver one thing in spades: heart. 'On Friday I visit my seventy-seven-year-old granny. She's smoking a joint. It's not a surprise.' Letford's 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 modernity's unearthly glare, it is a life with grain, with grit, 'rotten with wonder', that Letford seeks. The poems dig for a grace within dirt's humble endurance. 'There's dignity there. Lay yourself open.'



William Letford was born in Stirling, Scotland. He has received an MLitt from Glasgow University, an Edwin Morgan Travel Bursary from the Arts Trust of Scotland, a New Writers' Award from the Scottish Book Trust, and a Creative Scotland Artists' Bursary which allowed him to spend six months travelling through India.