An ex-pat Scot living in London, former teacher and business consultant, in EX SITU  M.E.Muir shares her concern about the environment with her fascination for the external world and the language we use to talk about it. “EX SITU” is M.E.Muir’s first poetry collection.

​Praise for “EX SITU”:
"Sensuous and intelligent poetry to be read over and over again"
Louis de Bernieres

"It takes words to make a poem and Mary Muir has a bagful of them at her disposal. Some are technical and derive from geology and science, some derive from her love of nature, particular trees and their names, some from her travels and some from a life lived in London and Scotland and the fears and concerns we share living here in Britain. But, to adapt a famous line from Eric Morecambe, words are important but the poet has to put them in the right order. And in poem after poem Mary Muir does this with eloquence, precision and hidden passion. Just read In the Grounds of the Yildiz Palace, Istanbul or Volcanoes Due and you will see what I mean."

​Ian Dunlop
(Ian Dunlop’s published works include a collection of poems, The Urban Fox (2016 and 2019.) His first published work was The Shock of the New, 1972.)
 
"M E Muir...brings London’s cityscape to life, finds the pockets of nature and orchestrates the cacophony of sound from weeds and creatures alike. If Muir exists ‘now only a lunar moment’, at least we have had the pleasure of seeing through her eyes first, riding through the starlight with her."
Isabelle Kenyon,
Managing Director of Fly on the Wall Press

Poems from EX SITU

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Volcanoes Due
Kilauea, Yellowstone, El Hierro, Naples,
even the albatross on her 10,000 mile-long flight
to send her warning shadow across our moving land cannot measure the shift of our tectonic plates
as fingernails lengthen slowly
and we change our light bulbs ban fridges
pedal gently towards deep change
while the great bird feathered with portent
still makes her powerful journey over our lives gliding through cumulus to land on precious grass as magma spews beyond our inexorable eruptions and the dark comes. 

​Poison
 
Where cars lie dying
in Ligurian scrapyards
the Via Aurelia
travels slowly past
old coffee cups lined along the wall
cow parsley, kiwi fruit smothering
dented bonnets
as the Lega Norte marches south.
 
Discarded gas-cans, batteries retro'ed
just hydrogen-powered fuel cells
purr silently ahead of the heavy tread
past broken elements of lancias, alfas, fiat,
the steel-capped boots tramp south
from the border wall
carrying precious olives,
an offering from infected trees.

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EX SITU 
M.E.Muir
ISBN 978-1-913329-18-1
paperback, 21 x 15cm, 84 pages
RRP £10.00
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