Firth

Firth is Garry MacKenzie’s richly layered poetic portrait of the Firth of Forth, spanning deep geological time, the rise and fall of the nineteenth-century fishing industry, and a future threatened by pollution and extinction. Formally inventive, the collection moves from haiku and prose sequences to ambitious long works, interweaving human and non-human perspectives. Politically urgent yet never preachy, MacKenzie’s poems explore beauty, devastation, and meaning in a shoreline of microplastics and bird flu. Anchored locally but resonant globally, Firth interrogates the ways we engage with the natural world, offering insight, urgency, and enduring poetic power.