The Conversation of Sheep

About the Book: 

This evening all
the greens have welled
into the sky like lilies.
The sheep are
stepping stones to heaven…
(Nocturne)

The Conversation of Sheep is a book by, for, and about sheep. For those who live in the country sheep are strange punctuation marks in life, chewing insouciantly in the background while folk are born, work, live and die below the great and sundering sky.

Some of these poems feature sheep as bucolic extras in the film of life, others delve deep into the secret nature and personalities of sheep themselves. Hugh McMillan is an award winning poet and Michael Robertson, whose photographs also populate this book, is a shepherd who lives in the same village.

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.