When the Grass Dances
When the Grass Dances
Rebecca Marr in a green hat, smiling among tall grass by the sea.
The image shows a woman with gray hair wearing a blue jacket, sitting in a grassy area and interacting with two dogs. One dog is brown, and the other is gray. The setting appears to be outdoors, surrounded by tall grass.

When the Grass Dances

Valerie Gillies & Rebecca Marr

£20.00
£20.00
£20.00
Temporarily Out of Stock

Binding: Paperback

ISBN 9781804252413

This book will be available September 2025

About the Book: 

This collection of poetry and photography will ground you, encouraging you to stop and listen to the grass growing. A verdant gathering intended to calm and restore. Spend time among the grasses and walk on with a heightened awareness of this overlooked yet vital plant family.

After several years in the field, two Scottish collaborators share their discoveries in what has been describes as a beautiful clarity of focus in word and image.

Reviews: 

A celebration of greenery in its many wondrous forms and in every changeable season —from rushes to sedge, wild oats to hemp—and we find it shivering with life and beauty. This is florilegium as devotional text, a botanical catalogue of great artistic ambition. CAL FLYN, Writer

The diversity of grasses is so important and is being remembered just as it's being lost. I loved this beautiful collaboration. AMY LIPTROT, Writer

There’s a lot to enjoy and it’s not to be rushed… informative as well as a joy to the senses. ELEANOR MACLEOD, Ranger

Full of everyday riches. I will try to overcome my plant blindness, and look not at grass, but the grasses! KEN COCKBURN, Poet and translator

The collaboration is utterly beautiful. The two are equal partners and symbiotic. Each is augmented by the other and converses with it. JOHN GLENDAY, Poet

It’s a delightful and deep curation, a reverence indeed. ROB MCGUIRE, Poet

A luminous shaft of hope. RISSA DE LA PAZ, Facilitator

I cannot see Carex echinata without these lines popping into my head! JOHN CROSSLEY, Botanist

About the Author:

VALERIE GILLIES has composed poetry since the age of fourteen. A former Edinburgh Makar, Royal Literary Fellow and an Associate of Harvard University, Valerie has been a literary arts practitioner in psychiatric and general hospitals with Artlink and a Writer in Residence in universities and libraries. She co-facilitated the creative writing workshops at Maggie’s Centre, Edinburgh, for sixteen years, and has been a trainer with Lapidus Scotland.

Her many collections include Tweed Journey, following the River Tweed from source to sea, and The Spring Teller, poems inspired by Scotland’s wells and springs. Her work always explores the healing potential of its environment, and this has an invigorating effect upon the reader.

 

REBECCA MARR was born in the Highlands and she has had a darkroom since childhood. She studied photography at Napier University Edinburgh. She moved to Orkney in 2007 for a Pier Arts Centre artist residency 'Art & Agriculture' working with farmers, and settled there. Rebecca works across digital and traditional darkroom techniques. Her subjects have included clouds, seaweed, Orkney’s wild flowers and of course the grasses.  She has contributed to over twenty publications, including several collaborations with archaeologist Mark Edmonds. She works with her husband Mark Jenkins on museum and community heritage projects.

Valerie & Rebecca first met in the mid-nineties, brought together by artist Kirsty Lorenz to run creative workshops with Artlink at The Royal Edinburgh psychiatric hospital. They have continued their friendship and support for each other over the years. Men & Beasts, a touring exhibition and publication in 2000, was their first collaboration. Two decades on, they embarked on a 5 year study of the wild grasses of Scotland.