Republic of Dogs/republic of Birds

Poetry. REPUBLIC OF DOGS/REPUBLIC OF BIRDS is the first book-length prose text by poet and translator Stephen Watts. The text was written on a typewriter in the late 1980s, then mislaid and lost. Found again in 2012, it was typed onto a laptop with minimal editing. The narrative moves between London's Isle of Dogs and Scotland's Western Isles, where Watts lived and worked as a shepherd. It is both a topographical journey through two landscapes and a highly personal meditation on the history and memory of these locations. Watts is interested in the changing landscape of London's East End: the destruction of working- class culture and its collective memory and the pace of urban development and regeneration. The writing is itself a form of activism, memorialising a lost culture through its physical traces and the stories and voices of its inhabitants.