Gerda Stevenson s long-awaited first full-length collection is filled with music skipping rhymes, piano, fiddle and dance music, laments and lullabies. She sings about butterflies, snowberries, aunts, teachers, Pentland rain, Sarajevo roses, graveyards, driftwood and the lost Eden of childhood; about wild weather, warm companionship and unmarked graves, about Bosnia, Iraq, Syria the Pyrenees and Scotland. If This Were Real is a kind of autobiography in verse, informed by intense relationships with places and people, by the personal and the political, by family life and the wider community in her native Scotland and beyond. Stevenson s experience as an actor and singer/song-writer is evident in the rhythmic sound structure of her writing these are poems that demand not just to be read, but to be performed, spot-lit lies, / floodlit truths, and shadowed ambiguities / in our retellings of the world s old tales .