Trio Verso at The Big Tent Falkland

The Chapel.

Trio Verso in a place apart (the chapel) at the Big Tent Festival Falkland.

Brian Johnstone at The Big Tent Falkland.


Trio Verso at The Big Tent Falkland


Trio Verso at The Big Tent Falkland (2)

Louise Major, double bass.

Richard Ingham, saxophones, bass clarinet, low whistle.

"The Book of Belongings" reads like an archaeology of the lost, its pages carefully uncovering and observing what has vanished, died or been abandoned. Visiting former theatres of war, remote landscapes of Scotland, France and Greece, pre-war classrooms and the nightmares of childhood, these poems are not afraid to gaze long and hard at what has been deliberately concealed, erased, or dismissed as worthless - the past with all its demons, its sad domestic litanies. Brian Johnstone writes with an enviable facility, often from unusual perspectives, eliding time and space, letting geography merge seamlessly into history and, in so doing, gives vanished histories a voice.
Born in Edinburgh in 1950, Brian Johnstone has lived in the Fife countryside since 1972. He worked as a primary school teacher in various Fife schools from 1975 to 1997. Since returning to writing in the late 1980s, he has been featured in the Scottish Contemporary Poets series with 'The Lizard Silence' (1996) and published two pamphlet collections - 'Robinson: A Journey' (2000) & 'Homing' (2004) - as well as appearing in numerous anthologies and other publications. In 2009 a small collection of his poems in Italian translation was published by L'Officina (Vincenza). His work has been published extensively in Scotland, elsewhere in the UK and in Europe and the USA. His poems 'evoke - a sense of spiritual immanence in their slow still spaces' (Scottish Literary Journal) and are 'full of stilled moments and nicely shaped incidents' (Scotland on Sunday). Several have been translated into Catalan, Swedish, Polish, Slovak & Lithuanian, and published in the respective countries. In 2003 he won the Poetry on the Fringe competition at the Edinburgh Festival. Previous successes include winning the Writers' Bureau (2003) and the Mallard (1998) competitions, as well as being a prize winner in the UK National Poetry Competition (2000). In 1998 he was one of the founders of StAnza: Scotland's International Poetry Festival, having previously co-founded Shore Poets in Edinburgh in 1991. He has served as a Director of StAnza since 2001 and has also taught creative writing for the University of St Andrews Department of Continuing Education and the Open College of the Arts. Brian Johnstone lives with his wife, the maker of artist's books Jean Johnstone, on the edge of the East Neuk of Fife.
To Buy Now.The Book of Belongings