At that time, government advisors recommended against regulating fishing in the Forth estuary, despite the wishes of fishermen who feared the fish population would be decimated without restrictions on trawling. Within a few decades the teeming waters of the Forth were denuded and the local fishing industry collapsed. The poems at the centre of Firth follow this ecological parable as it unfolds, although the story of the Forth told here covers a vaster timescale.
Firth is a formally restless collection, moving from haiku and prose poem sequences to ambitious long works on glaciers and oysters. Human and non-human perspectives intermingle in poems characterised by a wide-ranging vocabulary and metaphysical depth. While politically urgent, MacKenzie’s poems rarely preach but rather interrogate the conflicting ways in which we engage with the world around us. In this portrait of the Forth there is beauty as well as devastation; a search for meaning in a shoreline of microplastics and bird flu. The poetry is anchored in one locality but resolutely resistant to parochialism: the problems of the Forth are the problems of waters the world over.
