The Island in the Sound

by Niall Campbell

The Island in the Sound, the third collection by Scottish poet Niall Campbell, creates an archipelago of memories, lyrics, observations and folktales that place the small islands of his birthplace into conversation with moments from literature and history.


In this collection, mirroring the islands’ precarious future, we uncover strange links to Rome falling, Lindisfarne, and the temporary heaven found in Alamut, North Iran. The waters that churn around the islands in the poems bring strange things to their saints, remnants of various types of havens, crab-boxes, and figures from the working-class lives of Uist.  It is a poetry collection attuned to the growing sense that something is changing around us and there never will be a going back. These islands in the sound are what’s shaped, crafted, riven by the strange tuneful sea they sprang from.

Niall Campbell’s first collection, Moontide (2014), won both the £20,000 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and the Saltire First Book of the Year Award as well as being shortlisted for three other major prizes. His second ollection, Noctuary (2019), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Born and raised on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, he now lives in Fife.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 18, 2024

About the author

Niall Campbell is a Scottish poet. His first collection, Moontide (2014), was published by Bloodaxe Books and won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and was Saltire Book of the Year. Noctuary (2019), his second collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. His latest collection, The Island in the Sound was published in 2024.

He is the Poetry Editor of Poetry London and lives in Newport on Tay in Fife.

Reviews

[Jayant Kashyap · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s a poem in this collection, titled ‘First Fires’, that gives me slightly an unexpected image of Heaney’s ‘When all the others were away at mass’, and in its small moments, this collection, getting better in its second half, is worth it. What I liked the most is its “small life of love”, this series of poems titled ‘Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage’.

[W.S. Luk · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What is the poem?/Just the soul singing in its box."

It's apt that Campbell begins this collection with a poem inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins, because the best works in THE ISLAND IN THE SOUND channel something of the ecstatic, epiphanic force of his verse. Take the final stanza of "Barn Owl on Newburgh Road": "The slow intake of the night air/as the wing rises/the down-beat of my wife's chest as it sinks". It's a haiku-like juxtaposition of human and animal that gives a climax to the poem's comparison of breath to an owl's silent flight, aided by the polysemy of "down" evoking both the direction and the feathers of a bird. Campbell's metaphors and images transform their subject, presenting them to us in a fresh light.

You'll see a similar effect of sudden or sustained realisation animating "The Salmon of All Knowledge", "After the Language Deprivation Experiment", "After the Ending of the World" and "The Sparrow's Legs", all of which jolt familiar poetic themes out of cliche. While I found less force in Campbell's controlling metaphor of the geography of Scotland's islands, this collection boasts some truly beautiful and distinctive moments.

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunningly beautiful of poems, both profound and simple, enticing and puzzling, everyday and literary. The meaning and message of some poems seems clear, but for others it seems just beyond your grasp. In either case, I feel you could read this collection again and again and still only scratch the surface. Niall Campbell - what a talent!

[Goodreeds User · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucid and bracing !