Description
In Weather Blinks, Olive M Ritch revisits incidents, stories and impressions from her upbringing on Orkney to explore what it means to be an islander. These poems drill into identity and belonging, and the personal and political, to describe people whose existence is interdependent yet, like the islands, on the edge of the mainstream. At the heart of this collection are the lives of women – holding families and history together – and a sequence of poems re-imagining the life of the poet’s shipwrecked Covenanter ancestor, ‘one of the lucky ones’ to escape a slave-ship on which two-hundred-and-ten men died. Weather Blinks never flinches from past darkness but, as This Land describes, it revels too in Orkney’s “long summer nights of light” when all is “laid bare”.
