The runner-up prize in this year's Callum Macdonald Memorial Award for poetry pamphlets went to Ballast Flint (Cromarty Arts Trust), featuring poetry by Richie McCaffery.
A doctoral student at Glasgow University, he is researching the Scottish poets of the Second World War. Here is his title poem, rooted in the Cromarty landscape.
BALLAST FLINT
They took people from these shores,
pariahs of the law or kirk. Sent them down
into the holds of ships like ballast flint,
mined locally as plentiful useless weight.
The nodules looked like bone joints, broke
open to dark quartz, the black iris of a Sphinx,
unknowable and inscrutable. The dud cargo
was often dumped by the salt-chapped rim
of other seas where it did not naturally occur.
It's still there today, mostly, but some sparked
great fires, sharpened to double-edged blade,
a forgotten clan knapping their arms in the swash.
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