Book Launch: Em Strang's 'Firebird'

Join us for the launch of Firebird, a new poetry collection by Em Strang, at the Song

School, St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh.  With a reading and Q&A.

With A+E, the Cathedral's Art and Ecology project.

Firebird

Firebird explores the fires of destruction and rebirth, both literal and spiritual. Each poem

invites the reader to consider ‘the necessity of mystery’, where grief and joy, death and

rebirth, stagnation and transformation exist alongside one another. In two sections of

ekphrastic poems, Em Strang engages with visual art by American painter and erstwhile

nun, Meinrad Craighead, and Italian Baroque painter, Caravaggio. The poems speak

specifically to Craighead’s 2004 Bosque Fire series – images made in the wake of a

devastating fire on the banks of the Rio Grande in New Mexico where she lived – and to a

number of Caravaggio’s religious paintings made between 1595 and 1609.

Biography

Em is a poet, novelist and Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Her writing preoccupations are with

nature, spirituality and the masculine. Em has published three collections of poetry with

Shearsman (Bird-Woman, 2016; Horse-Man, 2019; Firebird, 2024) and has been

shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Best First Collection Prize, the Ledbury Munthe prize for

Best Second Collection, and won the 2017 Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Award. Her first

novel, Quinn, was shortlisted for the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize and was

published by Oneworld in 2023.