It’s almost 7 years to the day since Turas Press published its first book: on May 5th, 2017, we stood in this room to celebrate my own collection. Since then, it has been a rollercoaster of activity, supported by so many people, including you, booksellers, publications, Irish Writers Centre and of course, 13 – now 15 writers who have put their trust in Turas Press in the publication of a total of now 26 titles. I am grateful to you all and honoured that you have put your confidence in this endeavour.
Emma McKervey is an award-winning poet from Holywood in County Down. In 2015 she was the winner of the Poetry NI/Translink Poetry Competition. Her work has been shortlisted and Highly Commended in many competitions, including the Seamus Heaney Prize, the Northern Ireland Poetry Competition and the Bord Gáis Iris Book Awards Poem of the Year. She is a professionally trained musician in cello and saxophone and has engaged in many musical ventures that include collaborations with composers, dancers and theatre. Emma is a member of Women Aloud. Her first collection The Rag Tree speaks, was published by Doire Press in 2021. Highland Boundary Fault is her second collection.
Given the title, you won’t be surprised to learn that the collection is set in Scotland. Although I am from Scotland myself, I had never heard the term Highland Boundary Fault. It refers to a tectonic plate between the Minch and the Atlantic, a literal terrestrial boundary between the lowland, and the highlands of Scotland, including the Hebrides – where Emma’s great grandmother hails from, and, coincidentally, my own grandmother as well. Highland Boundary Fault could be summed up – if it’s possible to sum up this rich, magical tapestry – tell of how these divided parts of the world are unified – through a family story, a love story that takes us from the Hebrides to the Clyde estuary; and also, magically, through the evocation of landscape, history and myth. These poems are inhabited by flesh and blood people navigating the social mores of their time, and also by mythic characters recognisable from the stories not just of the Celtic world, but Norse, Greek, Indian and more.
The very first poem captures the flavour and the voice will be very familiar to Irish readers – its Cailleach, the hag – who opens this magical work with a declaration of ownership, a creation myth – powerful, and terrifying. P 11 lies 1 – 4
From here on, the human story of the almost star-crossed lovers, Dan from the Isle of Lewis and his sweetheart Lizzy from Greenock, is interspersed with interruptions from – who? Their ancestors – Persephone, Blodewedd, Odysseus and many more. Ours, too, maybe, For these are archetypes that tap into our deepest, mythic memory.
But these are flesh and blood creatures, too, and rooted in the social mores of their time. Telling, and reassuring, to see how the women of the island, in the face of patriarchal shift that forbids them from wearing bright colours, subvert the attempt to suppression in their colourful petticoats and undergarments. Vanity p 43 last stanza
There is such a wealth of erudition here, very lightly worn, that it is almost impossible to describe it, distill it. Luckily, I don’t have to, because the poet is here, the marvellous Emma McKervey, the architect of this magical construction, to share it with us.
Emma, transport us…