Tenderfoot by Chris Beckett MacGillivray Edward Ragg's debut collection

Edward Ragg's debut collection

—Colum McCann

Whether you already write poems

Peter Hughes moves on to this collection of poetry crystallising out of extended stays in Cambridge and Berlin

Richie McCaffery

Tenderfoot by Chris Beckett MacGillivray Edward Ragg's debut collectionA Tenderfoot is a novice, someone unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he hears rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine boy grown up and questions him. A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, Beckett's celebrated first Carcanet collection,