The Touch of Time

'Stewart Conn is one of Scotland's most skilled and wide-ranging poets. A sympathetic, if quite unsentimental, treatment of the natural world, or the rural one at least, does run throughout his poetry, but so do the themes of love, family relationships, the nature and power of art, and that time-honoured subject of poetry - the fragility and transitoriness of life itself' - David McCordick, Scottish Literature in the Twentieth Century. 'Ghosts at Cockcrow is a graceful "slipping" as he puts it, into seniority, at once a coming of old age, and an acquiring of senior status among Scotland's poets. It is full of high culture, old Europe and wry self-deprecation, visiting Barcelona, Burgundy and the capital to which he played laureate for three years, Edinburgh' - W.N. Herbert, Poetry London. 'Characteristically restrained, subtly lyrical and filled with gentle humour, The Breakfast Room is a beautiful and moving collection' - Anne Donovan, Sunday Herald. 'He stands among the indispensable poets of modern and contemporary Scotland' - Douglas Dunn, The Dark Horse.