MacGillivray – författare

The Nine of Diamonds is a book in nine parts constructed to play the Butcher – the Duke of Cumberland – in a Gaelic interpretation of the ghost gamble. Given the command on the back of a nine of diamonds – the Curse of Scotland – that the Highlanders should all be slaughtered, the persecution of Jacobite sympathisers after the Battle of Culloden under the Butcher was one of the worst atrocities carried out on British soil.

Using a kaleidoscope, a deck of tarot cards and an 1895 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, The Nine of Diamonds is influenced by French surrealism and opens with the Gaelic visionary practice of inducing visions behind a waterfall. Treating the Highlands as a Gaelic garden, the rebels on the run as herds of deer, and the preservation of Gaelic culture as a type of sugar-cured mummification, The Nine of Diamonds is set in a phantasmagoric landscape described in the Scots of Henryson and Dunbar but evoking Scots Gaelic concepts and motifs to mix Highland and Lowland experience with magical and occult terminology.

With the deer as a central image, MacGillivray’s poems draw from Nijinsky as gravity-defying faun, from Mallarmé, Duchamp and Breton. Written in the run up to the 2014 Scottish referendum, The Nine of Diamonds operates as a powerful wish-text. In this strange vision populated by badly-wired and furious neon unicorns, escorticati preparing their own bodies, Second World War MacLeod fighter pilots with talismanic photographs of the clan’s Fairy Flag in their uniform pockets, pole-dancing fauns, stained glass knights and rusty kaleidoscopes, the underlying message is clear: in playing the Butcher back, MacGillivray is still here.

The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is three Books of the Dead bound as one. This trilogy comprises an alphabet of trees spoken as witness to a Highland hanging, ten pattern poetry dream diagrams 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 in the imagery of their own form and function, drawing on the traditional Scots-Irish Gaelic alphabet of trees. Among reflex-men and co-walkers are the corpse measuring woods of the aspen, the hanging tree of the pine and the poison death yew. As a meta-narrative for ecological preservation of trees 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 in an exploration of thematic maps, dream languages and the pattern poem. Excavating technical poetic terminology such as ‘the lyric’ as indicative of the lyre, ‘the couplet’ a troubadourian coupling of lovers and the knife fight rhythms of iambic pentameter, a crisis of dream evolved in counterpoint to Basil Bunting’s striking argument for the predominance of rhythm, instead asserting the glimpse and the witnessing of the stanza as a mysterious pause. Many of the dreams delineated in the second book informed the other parts of the trilogy itself. In the End Is My Beginning: 35 Destroyed Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots is the third book, consisting of 35 Petrarchan sonnets for each of the steps Marie Stuart walked to execution. Thematically composed on the anniversary of her death at Fotheringhay, the sonnets were then chewed for the 15 minutes her lips were said to move after decapitation. Their delicate reconstruction in the final part of book three becomes a moving, sensical and non-sensical meditation on Mary’s demise: ‘Once, my heart had a skeleton.’