Winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024
In her debut collection Roshni Gallagher asks what can be seen, named or remembered. From Scotland to Guyana, the poems explore the porous boundary between the past and the present, and how ecological landscapes and landscapes of the mind and body are permanently altered by migration and memory. The elegiac series of poems Kala Pani reflects on the history and legacy of Indian indentured labourers in the Caribbean. Following the experience of women in the moment of rupture as they cross the ocean, these poems hover at the border of what is known and unknown.
Other poems navigate stories from Gallagher’s mixed heritage, from the Windrush generation to the sod houses in Ireland. She explores the tension between historical and personal silence – what can and can’t be spoken about. But stories are retained in the objects around us, from a pair of earrings made from stolen gold to a painting of a waterfall in the childhood home.
The poems look through windows, emerge from darkness, and traverse spaces ‘on the edge of things’ where land gives way to water. Seeing and being seen are often painful, yet there is beauty, healing and connection in what we choose to give our attention to.
‘What impresses me most about this debut collection is its honouring of our humanity, the naming of ordinary people with extraordinary lives. The Kala Pani sequence epitomises this: poignant, exquisite and haunting. Roshni Gallagher’s poems are so visceral, so perceptive, so adept in their use of echoes and white space, they will, to quote her, make you “vigilant when you walk down a street”.' – Patience Agbabi
‘These poems have a special light to them. They feel vulnerable and hard-won, like the best poems. They seem to want to sit down close with the reader and whisper these sad, honest and wonderful things that they know.’ – Niall Campbell
‘Intelligent, searching, and beautifully written, Roshni Gallagher's Even the Trees is an exceptional debut collection, full of enviable phrasing and insight. It's wonderful to find a new poet whose work you know you will continue to follow.’ – Karen Solie
‘These poems are delicately calibrated: they are able to pick out how the stars are not above us, but all around, how the Perseids fall like a shoal of metallic fish; but also carry the awareness of how there is pain in "seeing and being seen", and that some knowledge "can’t be come back from". Here, currents of racism and colonialism persist alongside and threaten to overwhelm the wonder of the unknown, the experience of the natural world made new. A complex, assured, at times stunning debut collection.’ – Peter Mackay
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