Zero Hours

About the Book: 

Written mostly in Scots, Rab Wilson’s new collection is a timely comment on our climate of zero hours contracts and benefits sanctions. From social issues to politics, from the sublime to the absurd, Wilson homes in on the unique aspects of life in Scotland and sets out his poetic manifesto for our country’s future.

Ceci n'est pas Stonehenge’, this is the cosmos,
distilled to elemental rock and stone,
depicting that interstellar collision,
four billion years away, a chaos
of realignment unimaginable,
when all the worlds we knew or didn’t know
osmotically pass through each other like ghosts,
to form new galaxies intangible.

Reviews: 

Many of Wilson's poems here, in both Scots and in English, are essentially stories in miniature, which is perhaps why he so often seems inspired by storytellers like Walter Scott, as well as artists like Joan Eardley. He has a highly effective skewering style, cutting through pretence and pomposity with ease. SUNDAY HERALD

About the Author:

RAB WILSON is one of Scotland’s most accomplished poets. He was born in New Cumnock, Ayrshire in 1960. After an engineering apprenticeship with the National Coal Board he left the pits following the miner’s strike of 1984–5 to become a psychiatric nurse. As a Scots poet, his work appears regularly in The Herald, Chapman, Lallans and Markings magazines and he is the author of a number of highly praised volumes of poetry and a Burns scholar.

Rab has performed his work at the Edinburgh Festival, the StAnza poetry festival at St Andrews, the ‘Burns an a’ That Festival’ at Ayr and has been ‘Bard of the Festival’ at Wigtown, Scotland’s National Booktown. Additionally Rab is a previous winner of the McCash Poetry Prize and was ‘Robert Burns Writing Fellow – In Reading Scots’ for Dumfries and Galloway Region. He has worked with the artist Calum Colvin on a book of responses to Burns and he is the Scriever in Residence for the National Trust for Scotland based at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Ayr. Currently a member of the National Committee for the Scots Language Resource Centre, Rab regularly attends the parliamentary Cross Party Group for Scots language held at Holyrood. He is a ‘weel-kent’ advocate for Scots writing. He lives in New Cumnock with his wife Margaret and daughter Rachel.