The Spring Teller - Softcover

Valerie Gilllies is an internationally known and highly regarded poet. She became The Edinburgh Makar, poet laureate to the city, in 2005. Her poetry collections include Tweed Journey (1989) which has been described as `a key text in contemporary writing' (S.B.Kelly). Other award-winning volumes include Each Bright Eye (1977), The Ringing Rock (1995), and The Lightning Tree (2002). Valerie is an inspirational teacher of creative writing in schools and universities. As a literary arts practitioner she has worked in psychiatric and general hospitals with Artlink, and in community arts with Lapidus. She is co-editor of the Scottish Poetry Library's first-ever interactive poetry map of Scotland, which maps locations and living poets. She received a Creative Scotland Award to write The Spring Teller, a book of landmark poems inspired by Scotland's springs and wells. Valerie lives in Edinburgh with her husband, the Celtic scholar William Gillies. They have three grown-up children.

What surprises and continually delights in this collection is its constantly renewed freshness of observation and language, like looking through a clear and powerful lens, which lets us move through the experience of the well with the poet. - EDINBURGH REVIEW