Cheryl Follon was born in Ayrshire, where she grew up. She studied Law and then English and Scottish Literature at Glasgow University before taking an MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin, and now teaches at a college of further education in Glasgow. She has received two writer's bursaries from the Scottish Arts Council, and has published three collections with Bloodaxe, All Your Talk (2004), Dirty Looks (2010) and Santiago (2017). Her essay on the Mojave Desert was shortlisted for the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing in 2012.
This is a feast of a book, with sensuality, earthiness and
physicality served like dishes never known before, but Cheryl
Follon is also bringing old traditions dramatically to life in
these scrumptious poems. The loving, cursing, blessing,
threatening, mocking and lusty gossiping in All Your Talk, as well
as beautiful fluent streams of ancient pagan freedoms, make this a
stunningly robust debut collection. All Your Talk is both wild and
formal, with poems that are beautifully shaped and deeply,
genuinely dramatic - grippingly so. This creates a really
attractive, at times spellbinding, mix of formal restraint and
surging ecstasy or abandon or wildness or Dionysiac fling. It's as
though a riot observed a ritual.
*Brendan Kennelly*
These marvellous poems are a sustained achievement. They all have a
kind of Regency air to them, founded in the context of Burns which
they acknowledge, but with deeper roots and associations: Dunbar,
the Ballads and ultimately Ovid (and, for the Irish reader,
Merriman). What is distinguished here is the confidence to stick
largely to a single form, even if it is one that the writer is so
good at: local stories, translated with immense linguistic brio
into the voice of a modern woman-Ovid.
*Bernard O'Donoghue*
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