SORELY MACLEAN Spring Tide and Neap Tide Selected Poems 1932-72 GAELIC POETRY

Spring Tide and Neap Tide: Selected Poems 1932-72 | Reothairt is Contraigh Taghadh de Dhàin 1932-72

By Sorely Maclean (Somhairle Macgill-Eain)

Published by Canongate, Edinburgh, 1977. First Thus. Hardback with dust jacket. Octavo (22 x 14cm), pp.x; 181 [1]

Gaelic Poetry . . a dual-language edition.. Gaelic poetry to the recto of each leaf, with an English translation facing on each verso. Publisher's blue cloth with gilt titles to spine and upper. The dust-jacket illustrated by Ruari McLean.

CONDITION
A very good clean copy. The dust jacket has been price-clipped but otherwise very good. Endpapers clean with no previous owners marks, Pages very clean throughout. Overall very good.

When people talk about Gaelic poetry in the twentieth century – particularly when the discussion is being held in English – more often than not, they’re talking about Sorley MacLean. More than any of his contemporaries, MacLean brought Gaelic poetry back into contact with currents of European art, politics and philosophy from which it had been excluded since the seventeenth century. Such was the shock among Gaelic readers when his collection Dàin do Eimhir agus Dàin Eile (Poems to Eimhir and Other Poems) appeared in 1943 that many questioned whether MacLean’s poems were Gaelic enough, some denying that they were Gaelic poetry at all. More than half a century on, Sorley MacLean is widely considered to be the greatest Gaelic poet of the twentieth century and occupies a space in the wider Scottish literary canon unequalled by any other Gaelic writer.

(Platform; Scottish poetry)