Click to enlarge

Caran An-t-Saoghail / The Wiles of the World

by Donald Meek, Editor(s)

ISBN: 9781874744672
Imprint: Birlinn
Publication Date: Mar 2003
Format: Paperback
Price: £16.99
Stock Status: in stock

This selection shows how Gaelic poets reacted to the many changes both in their native Highland communities and their adopted communities in the Lowlands and beyond. It also offers a fresh look at the literary creativity of the period, and demonstrates a greater range of poetic skills and approaches than has been previously recognised. As the poets respond to the ’wiles of the world’, their output covers the full sweep of human emotions, from elegies on death to songs of rollicking humour, from nostalgia for a lost world to the joy of new found religious faith. What is startling is that in a century normally seen in terms of twilight and loss, such astonishingly rich, outward looking and vigorous verse should be produced.

This is the first general anthology of Gaelic verse and song of the nineteenth century to be published since 1879. It includes translations of all the poems, together with notes on sources and themes and an extended introduction.    

Recommend to a friend