Granny's Interpreter includes ‘new and used,' published and unpublished poems that wheel around home. Belonging and memory on a sliding scale between tenderness and satire and between bereavement and celebration are prevalent themes. Many of these poems have been colored by the decades in which Ian Watson lived an emotional tug-of-war in Germany: between mother- and mother-in-law tongue, between Irish parents and their German grandchildren. Ian Watson was born in Belfast and has spent most of his adult life in Bremen, Germany, where he worked as a senior professor in Creative Writing and British and Irish Literature.