Cat Prince

The Cat Prince & Other Poems is the third poetry collection by Michael Pedersen, a prize-winning poet who also wrote Boy Friends. Cats, love, loss, friendship and careless joy all feature in the poems, which are tender and sharp, raw and bawdy, and full of playful language and lore.

The book is shaped by grief. A close friend dies brutally, and the poems that follow set out on a stubborn search for light and survival while paying tribute to a friendship that changed the poet's life.

Along the way Pedersen looks back at the comedy of being young and reckless. The poems recall boys showing off in a fishing tackle shop, games of feline transformation, laments for demolished buildings and a particularly stubborn case of constipation.

The poems move between the poet's emotional and physical landscapes, past and present, and between gothic splendour and natural grandeur in Scotland. The collection finds the poet at his bravest and most vulnerable, affectionate and fierce by turns.