The Gaelic Garden of the Dead by Macgillivray
Trilogy of Scottish surrealist poetry with three Books of the Dead including a tree alphabet and sonnets on the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Follows The Nine of Diamonds (Bloodaxe, 2016).
MacGillivray’s poems come at us with one language wearing the pelt of another, and in the affray that follows it is hard to tell whether dead or living mouth carries the fiercer biteBlood-boltered, thrawn and unco, her work is a Samhain of unexorcised historical memory, ventriloquised with the ‘cognition of bone’. Here the blasted landscapes of the pre-forgotten present give way to the richer patternings of the tree alphabet, all under the sovereignty of our highland Orpheus, the executed Mary Queen of Scots. Not since Sorley MacLean hymned the woods of Raasay have the ghosts of the Gaelic past bestrode the present more imperiously. -- David Wheatley
"Violent and formal" – the phrase is John Berryman’s – in a language both lupercal and arboreal, MacGillivray’s The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is magnificent. It is neither violent or formal for its own sake, but rebels against complacent, lyrical histories in voices compressed to a haunting and haunted diamond precision. What vivid strangeness, for instance, to hear again the unsung recusant poet, Mary Queen of Scots, in our secular millennium? The chromatic lines balance splendidly on the razor-edge between imaginary and real time, making her a high modernist in the tradition of her great voice-walkers and forebears Burns, Scott, and MacDiarmid. You are holding in your hands a spell of sibylline leaves -- Ishion Hutchinson
Occulted, fire-warped, close-stitched in freshly butchered skin, MacGillivray's keening rant is prophecy, hot and plain. A sequence of cards dealt in the wake of shamanic seizures that happen, and happen again, only because the poet insists on their ghostly witness. Here are songs of fierce tenderness and subtle cruelty. They sting in salt like a Highland curse. I relish every breath of the fall and crush. -- Iain Sinclair
"Violent and formal" – the phrase is John Berryman’s – in a language both lupercal and arboreal, MacGillivray’s The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is magnificent. It is neither violent or formal for its own sake, but rebels against complacent, lyrical histories in voices compressed to a haunting and haunted diamond precision. What vivid strangeness, for instance, to hear again the unsung recusant poet, Mary Queen of Scots, in our secular millennium? The chromatic lines balance splendidly on the razor-edge between imaginary and real time, making her a high modernist in the tradition of her great voice-walkers and forebears Burns, Scott, and MacDiarmid. You are holding in your hands a spell of sibylline leaves -- Ishion Hutchinson
Occulted, fire-warped, close-stitched in freshly butchered skin, MacGillivray's keening rant is prophecy, hot and plain. A sequence of cards dealt in the wake of shamanic seizures that happen, and happen again, only because the poet insists on their ghostly witness. Here are songs of fierce tenderness and subtle cruelty. They sting in salt like a Highland curse. I relish every breath of the fall and crush. -- Iain Sinclair
MacGillivray is the Highland name of writer and artist Kirsten Norrie. Her poetry and multi-disciplinary practice inhabits a rich artistic universe encompassing performance art, song-writing and the use of visual media such as sculpture and photography. She has published three books of poetry, The Last Wolf of Scotland (Pighog/Red Hen, 2013), The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) and The Gaelic Garden of the Dead (Bloodaxe Books, 2019). Her non-fiction work, Scottish Lost Boys (as by Kirsten Norrie), was published by Stranger Attractor/The MIT Press in 2018. She has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Cheltenham and Gloucester and Edinburgh College of Art. After living for many years in Edinburgh, she is now based in Oxford.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781780374437 |
| ISBN 10 | 1780374437 |
| Title | The Gaelic Garden of the Dead |
| Author | Macgillivray |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books Ltd |
| Year published | 2019-02-21 |
| Number of pages | 160 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |