Discontinuities: The Journals and Poetry Notebooks of Alastair Mackie 1945–1995, Edited by Christopher Rush, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 2022. 1193pp + xii, ISBN 978-1-85752-092-7.
Detailed Description
Alastair Mackie is now widely recognised as the most important poet in the Scots language in the second half of the twentieth century.
AUP has published Mackie’s Journals and Poetic Notebooks (under Mackie’s own preferred title, Discontinuities), which consists of a previously unpublished diary that the poet kept from the 1940s until a few days before his death in 1995. This work also contains many drafts of poems and stories, together with his responses to and translations from the work of a wide range of Europeans poets, both classical and contemporary. Some of these are published for the first time in the ‘Translations’ section of the New Collected Poems.
This volume will not only enhance Mackie’s already growing reputation as a poet in both Scots and English but will provide significant responses by a major Scottish poet to the cultural and political situation of Scotland in the second half of the twentieth century.
Contents
Introduction
Editor’s Note
1945 Le Carnet
1947 University Diary
1954 An Orkney Notebook
1955
1958 Stromness, Orkney
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
