In Child Ballad, his sixth collection, David Wheatley explores a world transformed by the poet's experience of parenthood. Leading his children through the landscapes of Northern Scotland, he follows pathways laid down by departed Irish missionaries and wolves, mapping a rich landscape of rivers, trees, and mountains. Writing across geographical and historical distances as he often does, Wheatley hones an aesthetic of complex intimacy, alert to questions of memory and loss while communicating the ache of the here and now, as seen through the eyes of young children. Wheatley is an Irish poet living and teaching in Scotland. As a cultural corridor, his Scotland is a space of migrations and palimpsests, holding different traditions in dynamic balance and fusion. Stylistically, Child Ballad draws on a spectrum of these traditions, from the Scottish ballad to the Gaelic bards, French symbolism, and the American Objectivists. A closing sequence on wildflowers and fungi of the poet's home in Aberdeenshire becomes an exercise in Orphic taxonomy, rippling outwards from the world of small flowers and mushrooms to a vision of deep history, geology, and ultimately the mysterious origins from
