Deer on the High Hills

Overview

Growing up on the Isle of Lewis, Iain Crichton Smith spoke only Gaelic until he was five. But at school in Bayble and then Stornoway, everything had to be in English. Like many islanders before and since, his culture is divided: two languages, two histories entailing exile, a central theme of his poetry. His divided perspective sharply delineates the tyranny of history and religion, of the cramped life of small communities; it gives him a tender eye for the struggle of women and men in a world defined by denials. Deer on the High Hills: Selected Poems includes forty years' work and proves that big themes - love, history, power, submission, death - can be addressed without the foil of irony and acquire resonance when given a local habitation and a voice that risks pure, impassioned speech. Editor John Greening provides indexes, a preface and an essay on the life and work of this important poet.

Reviews

"Over the years [his] poetry has increased in strangeness and beauty." —TLS

Author Biography

John Greening was born in London, studied at Swansea, Mannheim and Exeter, and after working for Hans Keller at BBC Radio 3, became a teacher, living in Egypt, Scotland, New Jersey and Cambridgeshire. Since Westerners (1982) there have been well over a dozen collections, notably To the War Poets (Carcanet, 2013), and several studies of poetry and poets. His Oxford edition of Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War appeared in 2015, as did his music anthology, Accompanied Voices: Poets on Composers. He is a regular TLS reviewer and a judge of the Eric Gregory Awards. Iain Crichton Smith was born on New Year’s Day in Glasgow in 1928. He wrote prolifically – poems, short stories and novels – while also teaching school-children on the mainland of Scotland. His first collection, The Long River, appeared in 1955, and there would be many more, along with twelve novels (in two languages). Iain Crichton Smith received the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry and an OBE.. He died in 1998 in the same month as Ted Hughes. His 1992 Collected Poems was revised and expanded by Matthew McGuire in 2011 and became the excellent New Collected Poems.