- Paperback: 400 pages
- Publisher: Chatto & Windus; New edition edition (26 May 1988)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 070113335X
- ISBN-13: 978-0701133351
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.7 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,219,130 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
This collection of poems contains most of the work that has appeared in MacCraig's previous thirteen volumes and also over a hundred uncollected poems from the past thirty years. In 1986 he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. All thirteen of Norman MacCraig's collections have been published by Chatto, most recently "A World of Difference" (1983).
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
From MacCaig's early work to the very latest prior to his death, inc. some previously unpublished pieces - this anthology is surely a mark of the absolute clarity and earthly humanity of this very great Scottish poet.
Buy this book and it'll be resting on your own top shelf forever....
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I became seduced by Norman's work after reading quotes from his poems carved in stone at Knockan Crag, (north of Ullapool), on one of their beautifully laid out Geological trails. The book is one of my most treasured and most dipped into. Mine is stuffed with post-it notes so I can find my favourite poems and get transported to the Assynt, in the North West Highlands of Scotland.
This collection of over 700 poems runs through a gamut of topics. But for me it is Norman’s ability to evoke the splendour of Scotland’s wilderness through many of his poems that draws me back to the book, time after time….
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Finest Scottish poet (in English) of the twentieth century
22 Jun 2000
Format:Hardcover
Norman MacCaig was born in 1910, his ancestry three parts Gael, to one part Lowland Scots. He lived and worked in Edinburgh, but his poetry is most associated with the Highlands, particularly, Suilven, and Assynt.
The Collected Poems of MacCaig is not a complete poems by any means. MacCaig expressly dissociated himself from his first two collections, Far Cry and The Inward Eye, published in the 1940s as part of the apocalyptic movement. There are also a number of poems missing from later collections (especially his early work, Riding Lights, The Sinai Sort &c).
MacCaig's poetry moved in transition from the formal structures of his 1950s works, to a free form structure in the 1960s with his wonderful works Surroundings, Rings in a Tree, and a Man in my position. His work in the 1980s was more fragmentary in style, like instants captured in notebooks.
MacCaig was self-effacing decsribing his poems as one or two cigarette pieces. He claimed to discard poems that didn't meet his exacting standard.
MacCaig was a wonderful rural poet capturing much of the beauty of the Highland landscape he loved. He was also a fine natural poet, with apt metaphors for the animal world (pigeons described as "wobbling gyroscopes of lust", a frog "a Joseph-coated tumbler"). However, while this is what he is best known for, MacCaig (from his early 1940s collections) wrote of the inexactness of language (what HLA Hart described as the "penumbra of uncertainty" in any words), and despite his avowed apolitical nature (contradicting his stand as a conscientious objector in the Second World War) was a fine poet about politics, castigating politicians for their use of weasel words, meaningless expressions.
MacCaig's best work though comes in two main strands, his elegaic poems, written in the later years of his life, for friends like Hugh MacDiarmid and AK MacLeod and his wife, and his love poetry. MacCaig is a fine love poet, conscious of the verbal tricks in, and challenges of, a relationship.
This collection is not a complete poems, but contains all the work MacCaig determined was worth keeping. It is a wonderful collection, and for a writer sometimes described as cold, much of it - especially his later work - packs a powerful emotional punch. For anyone with an interest in Scottish literature MacCaig is a pivotal figure. A man that, with his friends Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorely MacLean, kept the flame of literature in Scotland alive, and the quality up, during the dark years before Alasdair Gray, Tom Leonard, and Jim Kelman emerged.
MacCaig is important, and if you enjoy his work you might like Romanian poet Nina Cassian (especially her collection Call Yourself Alive?).
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. And you can forgive a man a lot that wrote Party, one of the most beautiful short poems in the English language about unrequited love.
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