Time Lines by David Underdown

Winner of Cinnamon Press poetry collection award

Time Lines is an exceptional debut collection that traces an arc from coming of age to maturity. Confronting the elusiveness of memory; the fragility of our recall of experiences, Time Lines is an intensely personal narrative that is also outward looking and engaged. Underdown looks through the eyes of others – the girl on the Chittagong train, the fifteenth century Viking settlers at Einarsfjord facing climate change. And he engages with the land to which all life must be connected. Beautifully crafted, humanely observed and with an ear for both the muscularity and lyricism of language. Time Lines is a richly rewarding debut collection.

David Underdown grew up in various places in England but has lived in the West of Scotland since the late seventies. Twelve years ago he moved with his wife to the village of Corrie on the Isle of Arran where he grows vegetables and tries to catch up on his reading. It is a place he hopes he will never have to leave.

Throughout a working life spent balancing family, career and a dream of being a smallholder he remained an inveterate scribbler. For the last six years he has concentrated on writing poetry.

Some of his work has won small prizes and been published in journals and anthologies. Time Lines is his first full collection.