Books

Scanning For Tigers
(Free Scholar Press, 2014)

Praise for Scanning For Tigers

“Where better to hide a boat than on an island? Where better to hide a world than within a world? asked Zhuangzi. In her gorgeous new book, Scanning For Tigers, Margot Farrington inhabits a hidden world, mythic and immediate, of reversals, quirks, sudden irreversible transformations: ‘see us touch earth, toe to heel, my father unkiss me, untake my face in his hands, tears race up his cheeks.’ It’s a numinous place: ash is ‘blown from huge fires’ strawberries ‘fall from our tranced fingers,’ in The Laurel Grove ‘you recognize your childhood when you hear it.’ Farrington is a poet who can write to the very edge of the self. In Scanning For Tigers, she’s working at the height of her remarkable powers.”

Dennis Nurkse

“Here’s a poetry collection to free mind and body. Rare luck it is indeed, to be born in human form, and even rarer to be born with such precise eye and poetic timbre as Margot Farrington. If, as the title poem has it, tigers remain embers, this book burns truly bright in the landscape of contemporary poetry. Scanning For Tigers is terrifically imaginative and beguiling.”

Linda M. Rodriguez Guglielmoni

Flares And Fathoms
(Bright Hill Press, 2005)

“Whether considering Brooklyn streets or the beaches of South Wales, Margot Farrington’s gaze is always intimate and engaged. What comes naturally to this poet is what too many of us have lost; a sense of astonishment at the worlds we inherit or manufacture. Here are fierce love and acute observation finding expression in marvelous poetry.”

Robert Minhinnick

Margot Farrington’s poems have the intensity, tension, and still momentum of a bow, or an arrow in the target. Utterly contemporary, her work unfolds with the precision of the ballad tradition—I’m reminded of the dark clarity of the Sacred Harp songs—but the depth and fierce generosity are hers alone.”

Dennis Nurkse