Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides

by Kevin MacNeil

This collection marks the arrival of a major new talent in Scottish poetry. Kevin MacNeil's voice and vision, while rooted in the Hebridean islands, is open to a wide range of cultures, not only those of Scotland - from Gaeldom to urban Scotland - but to the wider European and American mind and, through his interest in Zen Buddhism, to Japanese and Chinese culture.

With astonishing freshness and versatility, MacNeil's poetry creates powerful connections and new combinations -he has wit as well as feeling, a powerful sense of the past and the local while being resolutely turned towards the future and the cross-cultural.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1998

About the author

Kevin MacNeil is a Scottish novelist, poet, and playwright. He is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Stirling. His books include Robert Louis Stevenson: An Anthology Selected by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Diary of Archie the Alpaca and The Brilliant & Forever. He lives in Edinburgh.

Reviews

[Jack Deighton · Rating 3 out of 5]

MacNeil first published works of poetry before going on to write some of the most idiosyncratic novels to come out of Scotland this century – or indeed the past many decades. (See the Stornoway Way, A Method Actor's Guide to Jekyll and Hyde and The Brilliant and Forever.) This was his first book of poems and comprises IV Parts, the first of which, Learning the Art, consists mostly of very short stories which are poem-like in their economy. A couple are written in a form of English which approximates the Western Isles dialect. (The author is from Lewis.) The remainder of the book contains poems - some as terse as haiku - written in English or in Gaelic with English translations appended.