Search results for ""Author Peter Mackay""

This Strange Loneliness is the first comprehensive account of the poetic relationship between Seamus Heaney and William Wordsworth. Peter Mackay explores how Heaney repeatedly turns to the Romantic poet's work for inspiration, corroboration, and amplification, and as a model for the fortifying power of poetry itself, which offers the fundamental lesson that "it is on this earth 'we find our happiness, or not at all.'"Through an in-depth look at archival materials, and at uncollected poems and prose by Heaney, Mackay traces the evolution of Heaney's readings of Wordsworth throughout his career, revealing their shared interest in the connections between poetry and education, the possibility of a beneficial understanding of poetic influence, the complexities of place and displacement, ideas of transcendence, and ultimately the importance of "late style": later poems by Wordsworth might prove a cautionary tale, as well as example, for any poet. Placing Heaney's readings within their political, historical, and poetic contexts the book also explores how he negotiated the complex relationship between Irish and British culture and identity to claim a persistent form of kinship, and forge a strange community, with the Romantic poet.With illuminating readings that reveal new contexts to and currents in Heaney's work, This Strange Loneliness is a powerful evocation of the Irish poet's sense of the "uplift" that poetry can provide.

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A collection of 100 favourite Gaelic poems and songs – love poems and hymns, sea ditties and war poems, lullabies and elegies – many translated into English for the first time. Selected by Peter Mackay and Jo MacDonald, and including public nominations, these poems give a multi-layered taste of the full richness of Gaelic literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Cruinneachadh de 100 dàn agus òran Gàidhlig de dh’iomadh seòrsa agus o iomadh linn – nam measg bàrdachd gaoil agus laoidhean, òrain mara agus òrain cogaidh, tàlaidhean agus marbhrainn. Air an taghadh le Pàdraig MacAoidh agus Jo NicDhòmhnaill, le molaidhean an t-sluaigh, tha an cruinneachadh seo a’ toirt blasad de shàr-bheartas litreachas na Gàidhlig.

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This collection, covering 500 years of transgressive Gaelic poetry with new English translations, breaks the mould for anthologies of Gaelic verse. It offers poems that are erotic, rude, seditious and transgressive; that deal with love, sex, the body, politics and violent passion; and that are by turns humorous, disturbing, shocking and enlightening. In scholarly introductions in Gaelic and English the editors give contexts for the creation, transmission and value of these poems, as historical documents, as joyous – or tragic – works of art, as products of a culture and counter-cultures that have survived centuries of neglect, suppression or threats of being ‘burned by the hand of the common executioner’. After reading this book, you won’t think of Gaelic culture in quite the same way ever again.

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The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse is a timeless collection of Scottish poetry. It contains over three hundred poems ranging from the early medieval period to the twenty-first century, and paints a full-colour portrait of Scotland's poetic heritage and culture.Edited and introduced by award-winning poets Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and Peter Mackay, and including poems by Robert Burns, Carol Ann Duffy, Sorley MacLean, Violet Jacob, William Dunbar, Meg Bateman, George Mackay Brown, Màiri Mhòr nan Òran, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead and many more, The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse is a joyous celebration of Scotland's literary past, present and future.

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