Even the Trees - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

Winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024

Shortlisted for the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection 2026 (Forward Prizes)

In her debut collection Roshni Gallagher asks what can be seen, named or remembered. From Scotland to Guyana, the poems explore the porous boundary between the past and the present, and how ecological landscapes and landscapes of the mind and body are permanently altered by migration and memory. The elegiac series of poems Kala Pani reflects on the history and legacy of Indian indentured labourers in the Caribbean. Following the experience of women in the moment of rupture as they cross the ocean, these poems hover at the border of what is known and unknown.

Other poems navigate stories from Gallagher’s mixed heritage, from the Windrush generation to the sod houses in Ireland. She explores the tension between historical and personal silence – what can and can’t be spoken about. But stories are retained in the objects around us, from a pair of earrings made from stolen gold to a painting of a waterfall in the childhood home.

The poems look through windows, emerge from darkness, and traverse spaces ‘on the edge of things’ where land gives way to water. Seeing and being seen are often painful, yet there is beauty, healing and connection in what we choose to give our attention to.

‘Roshni Gallagher’s Even the Trees is a powerful and evocative collection, particularly in its use of space and form, highlighted through the ‘Kala Pani’ sequence. [...] It’s a beautiful, difficult, complex poem, and works well as the centrepiece of the collection. [...] from the sod houses of Ireland to the Yorkshire dales, the sky in Fife and the sea in Guyana, Gallagher’s use of place and landscape never strays too far from anger at worldly injustice…' – Sean Wai Keung, Gutter

'Gallagher's debut collection, a joint winner of the James Berry Prize, is an intimate exploration of the poet's mixed Indo-Guyanese, Irish and Scottish heritage.  Its poems move with the force of the Black Waters crossed by her ancestors, and the section on Indian indentured labourers travelling to the Caribbean is especially powerful, plucking stories of desperation, shame and survival from archives of the voyages. This is a timely, beautiful debut' – Shash Trevett, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Autumn 2026, on Even the Trees

‘What impresses me most about this debut collection is its honouring of our humanity, the naming of ordinary people with extraordinary lives. The Kala Pani sequence epitomises this: poignant, exquisite and haunting. Roshni Gallagher’s poems are so visceral, so perceptive, so adept in their use of echoes and white space, they will, to quote her, make you “vigilant when you walk down a street”.' – Patience Agbabi

‘These poems have a special light to them. They feel vulnerable and hard-won, like the best poems. They seem to want to sit down close with the reader and whisper these sad, honest and wonderful things that they know.’ – Niall Campbell

‘Intelligent, searching, and beautifully written, Roshni Gallagher's Even the Trees is an exceptional debut collection, full of enviable phrasing and insight. It's wonderful to find a new poet whose work you know you will continue to follow.’ – Karen Solie

‘These poems are delicately calibrated: they are able to pick out how the stars are not above us, but all around, how the Perseids fall like a shoal of metallic fish; but also carry the awareness of how there is pain in "seeing and being seen", and that some knowledge "can’t be come back from". Here, currents of racism and colonialism persist alongside and threaten to overwhelm the wonder of the unknown, the experience of the natural world made new. A complex, assured, at times stunning debut collection.’ – Peter Mackay

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