The Cream of the Well

Shortlisted for the Saltire Society Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award 2015.

About the Book: 

A weathered poet with four decades of fieldwork behind her, Valerie Gillies is a true guide to Scotland and beyond, and this collection affirms the companionship of poetry on the journey. The Cream of the Well contains a rich gathering from her earlier volumes, along with poems never published before.

Traditionally, the ‘cream of the well’ was the first sip of the well taken at sunrise, when the healing properties of the water were believed to be most potent. People would sleep out all night close by the well, and then they would run to drink as the sun came up.

Praise for Valerie Gillies:

Gillies’ poetry shows a masterly fluency with form – ballads, haiku, sonnets… This is polyglot poetry, yet it has a remarkably unbookish and outdoors feel. S.B. KELLY

My world is with people, classrooms, hospitals and buildings. I need guides that aid me in flying out of myself to locations that can inform and stretch my world. Valerie Gillies is such a guide. TED BOWMAN

Valerie Gillies writes like the wind and jinks like a hare in the fields of language. CANDIA MCWILLIAM

I like the way these poems are rooted in the elemental world… the craft and the truth are at one. ROBERT NYE

Energy, cool controlled energy… the classic qualities of the best traditional poetry. CHRISTOPHER RUSH 

She is a strong and eloquent celebrant of events and places in the historical and spiritual story of Scotland. She does for Scotland what George Trevelyan did for England – she’s a keeper of the Matter of Scotland, a spiritual steward of the meaning of the place, the ‘genius loci’. GABRIEL MILLAR

There’s such a range to her, she’s got a lovely range. ANNE SMITH

About the Author:

VALERIE GILLIES is an award-winning poet with seven books to her name. Best known as the river poet who followed the Tweed and the Tay from sourse to sea, she has held writing fellowships at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, in East Loathian and Midlothian, and at the University of Edinburgh. Her poetry has been published internationally and translated into Italian and German. She teaches creative writing in schools, colleges and hospitals. Valerie lives in Edinburgh with her husband and children. Rebecca Marr is a photographer who was born near Beauly. She has worked in the highlands and in Edinburgh and the Lothians on photography commissions and her black and white photographs have been widely exhibited. Her commercial work has been used by theatres and newspapers, and in music promotion. As a sessional artist, she works with groups as diverse as mental health, HIV and AIDS, Attention Deficit Syndrome, and drug rehabilitation. She traveled accross Scotland with Valerie to capture this collection of portraits of men and beasts at home or in their own settings.