Soirbheas = Fair Wind

by Meg Bateman

This collection of poetry provides a generous landscape for readers to share, and puts contemporary and traditional images of the Scottish Highlands side by side.

Genres: Poetry, Scotland

192 pages, Paperback

Published April 24, 2007

About the author

Vivienne Margaret 'Meg' Bateman (born 1959) is a Scottish academic, poet and short story writer. She is best known for her works written in Scottish Gaelic; however, she has also published work in English.

Bateman studied Celtic at the University of Aberdeen, learning Gaelic there and while living on South Uist, and completed a PhD in medieval Scottish Gaelic language religious poetry. She taught Scottish Gaelic at the University of Aberdeen between 1991 and 1998 before moving to Skye to teach at the Gaelic college, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. She has also taught Scottish Gaelic at the University of Edinburgh and is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews.

Bateman's first collection of poems, Òrain Ghaoil (Love Songs) was published in 1990 and her second, Aotromachd agus dàin eile (Lightness) was published in 1997. Both her first and second collections focus on human relationships and the idealised idea of love. Her third collection, Soirbheas (Air Wind) was published in 2007.

In 2011, Bateman's first published Scottish Gaelic short story, entitled Chanadh gun d'chur i às dha, appeared in the short story collection Saorsa published by CLÀR.

Her collection Transparencies was published in 2013 and featured her first published work to have both Scottish Gaelic and English poems.

Her Scottish Gaelic poetry has appeared in several anthologies, including Other Tongues (1990) and Twenty of the Best (1990). She has translated poems from Gaelic into English for An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets (1991) and The Harp's Cry (1993). She also features in Dream States: The New Scottish Poets (1997).

Reviews

[Raven · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have just finished savoring the first book of a new-to-me delightful poet, Meg Bateman. I serendipitously bought this whilst marooned at a cultural center on the Isle of Harris while my partner was changing our tire, and I'm so glad I did. "Soirbheas/Fair Wind" is a marvelous eye, a song of aging and loss, gentleness and discovery as old things pass away, having touched the world as they moved through it. It acknowledges the passing of an old lifestyle while not declaring that everything is doomed forever now, it allows itself to mourn without gathering a future bleakness. She follows it up with poems on love and on friendship that keep a similar overwash; there's often change and loss in there, but it doesn't remove the closeness. Her intimacies are often in negative space, and the facing-page translation seems to help with that. (My Ghàidlig is minimal at best, and comes from what Gaeilge I have. For Romance language readers, imagine that you speak tourist Spanish and you're trying to read poetry in Italian. About like that. You... know what some of the words mean! You have some idea of how it's meant to sound when read out loud! But you're missing nuance and texture and sometimes correct grammar. Better than nothing, but you're keenly aware of what you don't see in the original. Still, the only way to get better is to keep on.) So my sense of usage there might be due to my deficiencies as a reader, rather than something she intended as a poet... but I don't think she'd grudge me it. I will definitely be hunting up her subsequent "Transparencies" the next time I want to immersively treat myself.