If you’ve ever sat pondering the sea, a river or a stream then the sense of wonder and beauty of moving water will not have been lost on you.  This new collection of poems from Proost regular Chris Goan takes that neauty and creates a wonderful sense of reflection and movement in this moving book.

Where the Streams Come From is a collection inspired and created through the process of creating an exhibition at the lovely Tighnabruaich Gallery, over the other side of Cowal Peninsula, where Chris and wife Michaela live.

Chris writes:

“We cast around for a theme for the exhibition. We needed it to allow us to say something about the beauty of the area in which we live, but also to reach beyond the postcard-perfect image of wild places. We were interested in ideas of ‘becoming’ and ‘unfolding’ as well as the spirituality and psychology of wilderness. The imagery of moving water – rivers, streams, rolling waves – has long been employed by humans as a means of seeking to understand things beyond ourselves…Sometimes the water seems to be used to describe God, or an aspect of God, at other times it is used to describe life itself…It is perhaps the later description that most appealed to me as I began writing for the exhibition; the idea of streams of water as an allegory of the flow behind everything, the flow in the middle of everything, the flow that we are all part of.”

What came from that creative process is a beautiful poetry book which we’ve loved to read and are excited to share with you.

Chris writes with an honesty and a depth which is very rare.  Personally I love the pace of his poems, you can go gently with the words and like a meandering stream you feel very gently taken along, even when the subject matter is challenging.

This book has been highly commended, with writer Steve Broadway saying:

“Chris Goan is a poet for our time. Again and again, his thought- provoking, powerful, sometimes painful words get to the veryheart of what many of us are thinking and feeling. He’s frequently stopped me in my tracks. He’s made me laugh. He’s made mecry. He gives me hope, even in my doubts.”