Scarecrow, MW Bewick

The book is a limited edition of 94 copies, signed and numbered. The package includes a limited edition, hand-stamped poem and a postcard.

This debut collection of poems from MW Bewick transfigures contemporary landscapes of the city and the countryside in an unsettling flux of fractured narrative time and atomised human agency. Here, a panorama of gleaming towers and blood-red cranes mirrors another of overgrown flora and shorelines collapsing into the sea. At the book’s heart is the figure of the scarecrow – a monad, feet cemented, ragged legs flailing, unable – or unwilling – to act as the world rushes by. At turns wistful, angry, and touched with remorse, this inventive and thought-provoking volume brings together registers of folk, baroque and the surreal to confront a 21st-century sense of existential crisis.

MW Bewick is a writer of poetry and fiction. He works, and is widely published, as a journalist. He lives in Wivenhoe, Essex. See more at mwbewick.com

Praise for Scarecrow

‘A seriously good poet – fierce, political, able to capture industrial and post industrial landscapes with precise and sometimes painful imagery, tender about the natural world – love it!’
Kate Foley, poet

‘If I ever write anything half as good as Scarecrow or have something that lovely looking published, I’ll be bloody happy’
David Southwell, author Hookland Guide