Heliopolis

About the Book: 

McMillan’s Heliopolis ranges from his kitchen table to Greece, St Petersburg and Mars. He finds the universal in the purely local and the local in the universal. Where people live, breath, hope and suffer that’s where his poetry is, as legacy, dream and testament.

Reviews: 

The poems in this collection are the hammered gold and enamelling of a master craftsman. ASIF KHAN, Director, Scottish Poetry Library

Here are poems that I think are special, at once local, personal and universal. Treat yourself. ANDREW GREIG

I was entertained and moved by Hugh McMillan’s poetry… these pieces work like resonant and intricately packed short stories. LESLEY GALISTER

In a Scottish literary scene crowded with excellence, McMillan is unique in the angle and tone of his attack on the familiar. IAN DUHIG

About the Author:

HUGH MCMILLAN is a poet from Penpont in Dumfries and Galloway. He has written five full collections of poetry and has read in events and poetry festivals worldwide. His pamphlet Postcards from the Hedge was a winner of the Callum Macdonald Prize in 2009, a prize he won again for Sheepenned in 2017; as part of that prize, he became Michael Marks Poet in Residence for the Harvard Summer School in Napflio, Greece. He was also a winner of the Smith Doorstep Poetry Prize and the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. Devorgilla’s Bridge was shortlisted for the Micael Marks Award and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Basil Bunting Poetry Award. In 2014 Hugh was awarded the first literature commission by the Wigtown Book Festival to create a work inspired by John Mactaggart’s The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopaedia (1824); McMillan’s Galloway was published in limited edition in 2015 and in a revised edition from Luath in 2016. He has featured in many anthologies, and three times in the Scottish Poetry Library’s online selection Best Scottish Poems of the year. His poems have also been chosen three times to feature on National Poetry Day postcards, the latest in 2016. In 2020 he was chosen by the Scottish Poetry Library as one of four ‘Poetry Champions’ for Scotland, to seek out and commission new work, and was given the role as editor of Best Scottish Poems 2021.