Search results for ""Author Roderick Watson""

For the first time, the full canon of poetry from Scotland is available to readers in one volume. The Poetry of Scotland presents all the major, and many less well-known Scottish poets in a broad historical perspective from the fourteenth century to the present day. Unlike other anthologies, it includes concise bibliographies of each writer, user-friendly notes, and poems in Gaelic with modern English translations. With contents listed by both chronology and theme, on-page glossaries and a full introduction by Roderick Watson, this is the definitive edition for students and lovers of Scottish poetry everywhere.

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Roderick Watson is a poet of introspection and retrospection. In the rich distillation of his language, the images of a remembered picnic, a Tuscan encounter, an out-of-date postcard, a holiday cottage - all these assume an iconic intensity in the quiet deliberation of this verse. Roderick Watson is a poet who ponders rather than postures. Each one of these poems, in his accomplished Scots as well as in English, is a pleasure to read, to re-read and to remember. -- Philip Hobsbaum

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The Quarry Wood, although published well before Sunset Song, inhabits a similar world; the progress of its heroine could almost be the alternative story of a Chris Guthrie who did go to university. Compassionate and humorous, the grace and style of Shepherd's prose is heightened by a superb ear for the vigorous language of the north-east.The Weatherhouse, Shepherd's masterpiece, is an even more substantial achievement which belongs to the great line of Scottish fiction dealing with the complex interactions of small communities, and especially the community of women - a touching and hilarious network of mothers, daughters, spinsters and widows. It is also a striking meditation on the nature of truth, the power of human longing and the mystery of being.The third and final novel, A Pass in the Grampians, describes Jenny Kilgour's coming of age as she has to choose between the kindly harshness of her grandfather's life on a remote hill farm, and the vulgar and glorious energy of Bella Cassie, a local girl who left the community to pursue success as a singer, and has now returned to scandalise them all.The Living Mountain is a lyrical testament in praise of the Cairngorms. It is a work deeply rooted in Shepherd's knowledge of the natural world, and a poetic and philosophical meditation on our longing for high and holy places.This omnibus edition of Shepherd's prose works reveals how her sensitivity and powers of observation raise her work far above the status of regional literature and into the front rank of Scottish writing.

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Ever since its first appearance in 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has proven itself to be a tale of undiminished power for readers all over the world. But the story of the respectable Dr Jekyll, even in a London setting, has links that stretch back to the narrow wynds of Edinburgh and the bleak moors and shores of the North.This collection reveals the Scottish origins of Stevenson's great masterpiece of psychological fiction and his stories of possession, doubleness and terror, and uncovers his fascination with the uncanny which brought the creator of Mr Hyde screamingly awake one winter's night over one hundred years ago.

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'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.

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Kidnapped - Catriona - The Master of Ballantrae - Weir of HermistonThese four great novels take us deep into Robert Louis Stevenson's imaginative and bitter-sweet relationship with his native country.Kidnapped, and its sequel Catriona, are renowned the world over as supreme stories of adventure and romance. On another level they also explore the subtle divisions of Scottish history and character in the eighteenth century, and (some would say) the present day.The Master of Ballantrae takes a darker and more disturbing turn, with its tale of rival brothers caught in a webof hatred, obsession, love and betrayal which draws them to their end in the frozen wastes of North America.Stevenson's fascination with the divided nature of the human self (most obviously demonstrated in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) appears again in the Weir of Hermiston with its terrible confrontation between a father and his son.With an unsurpassed combination of physical adventure and psychological insight, The Scottish Novels have moved and thrilled readers and writers from Stevenson's contemporaries to the present day.

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