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Krok Books in Ukraine published a translation of The Good Dark. It’s the first book of mine to be fully translated.

There will be screenings of The Good Dark, made by Lucas Chih-Peng Kao, in Edinburgh and Stirling over the next fortnight. First in Edinburgh at the Cameo Cinema, 7pm, Thursday 19 April, and in the Mediterranea Restaurant, Stirling, 7pm, Thursday 26 April. The screenings are part of the unDependence Film Festival, and you can read their whole programme here.

A poet wanders through a desolate house and sees the reanimated lives of Jim and Flo, the previous tenants. As the poet recites his poem, bringing the worlds of the past, present and imagination closer, the couple struggle to grasp the last breath of their relationship.

My second collection, The Good Dark, has been reviewed by Donald Marshall on the Scottish Writers’ Centre website. Here’s a couple of quotes from the review:

‘Reading Ryan Van Winkle’s collection The Good Dark (2015) I began to feel as though I had entered into a new world. The poems within are self-standing and distinctive, but together they create a harmonious vision of melancholia and reflectiveness that is so self-aware that the work presents an electric shock to the staid trends of lyric poetry’

‘This is a sorrowful but cathartic collection. The Good Dark is painted with subtle hues of emotion that lead you, unprotesting and mesmerised, into the world within.’

Interesting review by John Fields over at Poor Rude Lines, featuring Depeche Mode, 50 Shades of Grey, Romeo & Juliet. Have a read!

The Good Dark has won the Saltire Society’s Poetry Book of the Year award. Here’s what the judges said: “Van Winkle works with the language of love and lost till it is scarcely recoverable but which still nourishes the lover’s past and present. His range is remarkable: everything invokes everything else, the tactile calls in the intellectual, one poem calls in every other poem, mundane tasks call in whole physical and emotional worlds.”

You can get a copy direct from Penned in the Margins or ask at your local bookshop.

http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2015/02/the-good-dark/

Really delighted that The Good Dark has been selected as one of The Bottle Imp‘s Best Scottish Books. It’s in excellent company, alongside Don Paterson, Janice Galloway, Kirsty Logan, Malachy Tallack and others. You can read up on all of the selections, plus a neat paragraph on each book at The Bottle Imp.

Really delighted to have The Good Dark reviewed alongside Claudia Rankine and Matthew Siegel in the forthcoming edition of Magma Poetry.

“Many of the poems in this profoundly lyrical collection are characterised by long sentences, often breaking across the sense – with short lines and short breaths, which, if you read it as I did, might have the strange effect of making you sigh at regular intervals.”

“But ultimately it is for its sound that I found this collection most enjoyable: it is an exercise in sustained tone, possessing a consistent, melancholy music, a heart-breaking sob in its voice.”