The Shell of Stone

By Ian Nimmo White

The Shell of Stone is Ian Nimmo White’s third book-length collection of poetry. The author being a keen genealogist, many of these poems resonate with his passion for heritage, some marking major events of the twentieth century, with other poems travelling even further back to previous centuries.
The author also touches on the inevitable passing of time and his own ageing, which he addresses with some mischief and fun. While there is always a presence of nostalgia, sometimes sadness, White balances this with poems about the joy of having grandchildren, observations of wildlife and the ever-increasing amount of time he is spending in his garden.
The reader is left with feelings of respect for the past together with hope for the future. White’s poetry is laced with warmth and humanity, not to mention a good helping of his native Scottish humour. The experience gained in a four-decade-long career in community service has given the poet a priceless knowledge and understanding of the lives of
ordinary men and women, who will be able to relate to these poems and enjoy them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781398450370

Ian Nimmo White

Ian Nimmo White was born in Paisley in 1948. He served Fife Council as a youth and community worker for 35 years before retiring in 2008, and much of his poetry reflects this long experience of working with people of all ages. His verse, in both English and Scots, has appeared prolifically in literary magazines throughout the UK. Two previous book-length collections have been produced, Standing Back (Petrel Publications) in 2000 and Symmetry (Trafford Publishing) in 2007. He was editor of Fife Lines poetry magazine from 1998 to 2005.

Book preview

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the following bodies for the encouragement and support which has helped him to reach this point in his poetry, specifically this publication by Austin Macauley:

The Scottish Poetry Library, The Scottish Book Trust, Chapman Publishing, New Writing Scotland, The Scots Language Society, the Glasgow Herald newspaper, the Dundee Courier newspaper, and the Glenrothes Gazette newspaper.

Foreword

by Tom Hubbard

These are poems marked by a blend of compassion for forgotten folk and protest at those who forgot them. Ian Nimmo White devoted his working life to public service and his leisure to celebration of the natural beauty of his adopted Fife. Prior to his retirement, these commitments came together in his championing of other writers as a magazine editor and organiser of a book festival. In his own poetry we continue to encounter a unique synthesis of practicality and vision. Here the small Fife town of Leslie, where he lived for many years and raised a family with his wife Janice, opens up into European history. Here is the expansiveness of the Lomond Hills and its hinterland, the delight in place names such as Croftouterly and Kirkforthar. Nearby Loch Leven, to the west of the Fife boundary, is famed for the incarceration of Mary Queen of Scots in its island fortress, and this is memorably evoked by Ian in the lines ‘The wind soughed and wound itself / up and around the shell of stone.’ (That’s up there with Charles Dickens’s response to the same time and place: ‘with the rippling of the lake against [the castle-prison], and the moving of the shadows on the room walls.’)

Read Ian’s ‘A Train Driver and a Poet’ and you’ll not fail to be moved by