Mary Thomson's reflections on her first year of living in Glasgow's East End are featured in her pamphlet - called simply East End - short-listed for this year's Callum Macdonald Memorial Award (run by the National Library of Scotland).

Mandy Sinclair's minimalist line-drawings enhance the poems, of which this is a sample.

EAST END SPRING

On a day when winter's dust and salt

still swirled at the road's edge

spring was stumbling awkwardly into itself

with scant grass needling through withered brush,

spills of daffodils on verges.

We had passed fields of muddied ponies,

acres of ploughed furrows drying to dun

in the fretful wind and tentative sun.

We were coming blindly

through a season of worry and scans,

so when we drove home

via a town called Halfway it,

and the day,

was of such a scrappy sort

we expected no better

of our place by the Green.

Yet when we walked by our rippling river

willows waved pale fronds,

cherry trees promised blossom.