Description
Book Synopsis'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.
Trade Review'[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
