Promotional Information

Niall Campbell’s highly praised debut Moontide was one of Bloodaxe’s biggest selling first collections of recent years, receiving wide press coverage. Moontide won Britain’s biggest poetry prize, the £20,000 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award as well as Scotland’s Saltire First Book of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for five first collection prizes.

Table of Contents

13 Midnight
14 First Nights
15 Thinning Apples
16 First Illness
17 Keeping the Poacher’s Light
19 Crusoe, One Year on the Island
20 Clapping Game
21 All the Doubts of the Late Evening
22 Moth
23 Lyrics
25 Packhorse
26 The Address
28 Poacher
29 A New Father Thinks About Those Running Home
30 Dear,
31 The Night Watch
32 The Disembarked
33 Go There
34 The Water Carrier
35 Returning to Work
36 Measuring Heat Loss in the Arctic
37 Dream
38 Blackberries
39 Poetry When Working
40 An Island Vigil
41 The Cut
42 Four Memories in No Particular Order
43 Horseshoe Crab
44 Proof
45 Living in the City and Dreaming of the Winter Beach
46 Two Poems after Cuevas Lopes
46 Picking Day
47 Leaving Town
48 Other Branches
49 February Morning
50 Glasgow
51 Cooling a Meal by the Outside Door
52 Capture
53 Tightrope
54 Thirties
55 Language
56 From the Spanish
58 Good Night

61 Acknowledgements
63 Biographical note

About the Author

Niall Campbell was born in 1984 on the island of South Uist, one of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and an Arvon-Jerwood Mentorship in 2013, and won the Poetry London Competition in 2013. His work has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies including, Granta, The Dark Horse, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The Salt Book of Younger Poets and Best Scottish Poems 2011. His debut pamphlet, After the Creel Fleet, was published by Happenstance Press in 2012. His first book-length collection, Moontide (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), won Britain's biggest poetry prize, the 20,000 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, as well as the Saltire First Book of the Year Award; it was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. First Nights: poems, a selection from Moontide with additional new poems, was published by Princeton University Press in the US in 2016. His second book-length collection, Noctuary (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He lives in Leeds.

Reviews

Full of striking moments, the poems of Moontide are illuminated by powerful lyric impulses.
*Guardian*

In his understated debut collection, Campbell, who spent his childhood on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, draws on an intimately known landscape as witness to solitude and shared lives.
*Financial Times, Summer books 2014*

With precise language, musicality and insight, Campbell’s first collection explores solitude, companionship and memory against a backdrop of closely observed nature. His intimate poems draw on the seascapes and myths of his native Eriskay, in the Outer Hebrides, but take the same sharp-focused eye to other places, too... Meditative and haunting – my favourite poetry book of 2014 so far.
*The Lady*