Uncommon Place

Uncommon Place is a book rooted in Scotland's mountains and open spaces, its fenced enclosures and mined ground.

It develops from earlier books what Tom Leonard has called "the most intelligent debate between technology and nature in poetry that I know." Through rivers, weather and wild creatures, as well as through industrial landscapes and urban spaces, the poems explore a core preoccupation, that of how we experience being in place, the relationship of the walker with the shifting nature of the place through which she walks. "Rooted in the local, the poems in this book deliver a profound understanding of emotions engendered by the geologies and natural histories of landscape and what it means to fully inhabit this country: true dwelling; compelling, unique, enduring poetry." -Gerry Loose