Between Mountain and Sea: Poems From Assynt

Description

'Two Men at Once' is one of Norman MacCaig best known poems. He was indeed two men at once: Edinburgh, the city where he was born and lived as a teacher and poet, was his home, but no other place shaped his poetry more than Assynt in Sutherland. It is here that he would spend many a summer on family holidays, walking the hills and fishing the lochs. MacCaig's fresh eye saw remarkable newness even in the everyday and each poem is a tiny revelation, a new look at an old friend. This collection celebrates, renews, and rediscovers Norman MacCaig's Assynt. 'I have always loved the mixture of strictness and susceptibility in Norman MacCaig's work. It is an on-going education in the marvellous possibilities of lyric poetry' - Seamus Heaney 'I have read or re-read every poem [in the Collected Poems], and I think it one of the greatest literary experiences of my life' - Sorley MacLean 'Whenever I meet his poems, I'm always struck by their undated freshness; everything about them is alive, as new and essential, as ever' - Ted Hughes

Norman MacCaig was born in Edinburgh in 1910. His formal education was firmly rooted in the Edinburgh soil: he attended the Royal High School, Edinburgh University and then trained to be a teacher at Moray House. Having spent years educating young children he later taught Creative Writing, first at Edinburgh University, then at the University of Stirling. He died in 1996. Roderick Watson was born in Aberdeen and educated at Aberdeen Grammar School, Aberdeen University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. A recently retired professor at Stirling University, he has lectured and published widely on modern Scottish literature and currently co-edits the Journal of Stevenson Studies. His main poetry collections are True History on the Walls (1977) and Into the Blue Wavelengths (2004).

'[Reveals] the poet's relationship with Assynt, a relationship that lasted forty years and informed his imagination as no other place did. An excellent introduction to the formal trajectory of MacCaig's work' * Times Literary Supplement * 'I have always loved the mixture of strictness and susceptibility in Norman MacCaig's work. It is an on-going education in the marvellous possibilities of lyric poetry' -- Seamus Heaney 'I have read or re-read every poem [in the Collected Poems], and I think it one of the greatest literary experiences of my life' -- Sorley MacLean 'Whenever I meet his poems, I'm always struck by their undated freshness; everything about them is alive, as new and essential, as ever' -- Ted Hughes