Ross Wilson’s first collection, Line Drawing, was shortlisted for the 2019 Saltire Poetry Book of the Year. He comes fae Kelty in West Fife and lives in Condorrat, North Lanarkshire. Integrating the personal with the social, the present with the historical, and the masculine with the feminine, the poems in Vital Signs express the joys and worries of first fatherhood in the midst of working in an intensive care unit during the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

‘His poetry reflects his background and the difficulties, contradictions and ironies of working-class life today. He’s also a thinking poet, aware of and interested in not just the craft but its practitioners and its traditions.’

 

— Hugh McMillan

 

‘Ross Wilson’s poems bend time to reveal the overlooked and forgotten lives rooted in his community. His thoughtful political stance make his an authentic celebratory voice, rich, compassionate, intelligent and crackling with clarity.’

 

— Gerry Loose

 

‘Ross Wilson is an NHS ICU auxiliary nurse and former teenage champion boxer. A working-class Scottish autodidact, he has read closely and widely. His poetry reflects this. While it can be plain-speaking when it wants, it also refuses ‘to falsify’—as Robert Frost had it—‘the ambiguities’.

 

— Gerry Cambridge

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