Bokus
MacGillivray - Gaelic Garden of the Dead, Häftad

Häftad, Engelska, 2019

Gaelic Garden of the Dead

Av MacGillivray

Del i serien Bloodaxe Books Ltd

166 kr

Beställningsvara. Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar. Fri frakt över 249 kr.

Beskrivning
The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is three Books of the Dead bound as one. This trilogy comprises an alphabet of trees, ten dream pattern poems and thirty-five death sonnets deconstructed to Mary Queen of Scots. Saturated with the languages of arboreal myth, magic and folklore in Gaelic culture, the first book, The Gaelic Garden of the Dead, is a forest quartet whose letters enunciate the imagery of their own form and function, drawing on the traditional Scots Gaelic alphabet of trees. Among reflex-men and co-walkers are corpse measuring aspen rods, the pine hanging tree and the poison yew. As a meta-narrative of ecological preservation and a comment on ancient language culture, The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is a grove of observation: ‘Love’s eyes are colourless: a motive for moving through underworlds.’ A Crisis of Dream, the middle book, is a sequence of ten dream diagrams. Many of the dreams delineated in the second book inform other parts of the trilogy. The third book, In the End Is My Beginning: 35 Destroyed Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots, consists of thirty-five Petrarchan sonnets for each of the steps Marie Stuart descended to execution. Composed on the anniversary of her death at Fotheringhay, the sonnets were then chewed for the fifteen minutes her lips were said to move after decapitation. Their delicate reconstruction becomes a moving meditation on Mary’s brutal demise: ‘Once, my heart had a skeleton.’
Produktinformation
  • Utgivningsdatum: 2019-02-21
  • Mått: 156 x 234 x 15 mm
  • Vikt: 310 g
  • Format: Häftad
  • Språk: Engelska
  • Serie: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
  • Antal sidor: 160
  • Förlag: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
  • ISBN: 9781780374437
Utforska kategorier
Mer om författaren

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.

Recensioner i media

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 bite. Blood-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.

Betyg & recensioner

0 recensioner

Inga recensioner tillgängliga.

Mer från samma författare