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Other Worlds: An Anthology of Scottish Island Poems
An island can be a source of escape or return, of solace or threat.
In Other Worlds, editor Stewart Conn has sought poems to set the readers' heart racing, through a sharpening of memory or in opening new vistas and evoking new worlds and states of mind, from Barra and Eriskay to Luing, Mingulay and the Isle of May; Inchcape and the Torren rocks to Taransay and Tiree.
In this anthology rich depictions of island flora and fauna sit alongside sightings of croft dwellers and ferry-lowpers. Expressions of affection and accounts of imprisonment and bereavement sit cheek-by-jowl with evocations of drowned sailors, corporeal and ghostly. Praise poems alternate with diary entries and holiday postcards. Others cover stretches of water: Corrievrecken, say, or the Minch. And while there is a recurring sense of island heritage, and of belonging, the poet's feet need not be actively on island soil or on the deck of a fishing-boat.
In Other Worlds, editor Stewart Conn has sought poems to set the readers' heart racing, through a sharpening of memory or in opening new vistas and evoking new worlds and states of mind, from Barra and Eriskay to Luing, Mingulay and the Isle of May; Inchcape and the Torren rocks to Taransay and Tiree.
In this anthology rich depictions of island flora and fauna sit alongside sightings of croft dwellers and ferry-lowpers. Expressions of affection and accounts of imprisonment and bereavement sit cheek-by-jowl with evocations of drowned sailors, corporeal and ghostly. Praise poems alternate with diary entries and holiday postcards. Others cover stretches of water: Corrievrecken, say, or the Minch. And while there is a recurring sense of island heritage, and of belonging, the poet's feet need not be actively on island soil or on the deck of a fishing-boat.
- GenresPoetry
176 pages, Paperback
Published July 5, 2022
About the author
Stewart Conn
58 books1 followerStewart Conn is a Scottish poet and playwright, born in Hillhead, Glasgow. His father was a minister Kelvinside Church but the family moved to Kilmarnock, Ayrshire in 1941 when he was five. During the 1960s and 1970s, he worked for the BBC at their offices off Queen Margaret Drive and moved to Edinburgh in 1977, where until 1992 he was based as BBC Scotland's Head of Radio Drama. He was the inaugural Edinburgh City Makar from 2002 to 2005.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 8, 2026
The islands of Scotland are a kind of perfection of solitude and nature, and those who feel strongly about them will accept no comparison. ‘I know the Isles of Greece myself,’ Hugh MacDiarmid said: ‘they are not fit to be mentioned in the same breath as the Hebrides.’
Communing with the world in such places is a sort of poetry already, so this anthology of Scottish island verse feels like an example of using the right tools for the job. Even then, it is hard to find words to capture the feeling. Iain Crichton Smith writes of the ‘ancient daylight’; by early evening, Sheila Templeton sees ‘the moon still a wispy question / in a pale sky’; and later, Alison Prince watches as ‘dawn tears the black sky open / like a tangerine’. I loved the assonances and slowly retreating vowel sounds of WS Graham’s ‘Gigha’, which ends:
One sees simple things in a new way, as though for the first time, and the poetry struggles to capture such small moments and preserve them. Sometimes English itself feels clumsy compared to the dour trills and fricatives of Scots, as in something like Ann MacKinnon’s description of the Hebridean coast:
John Rice hears local languages as part of the natural world itself, in ‘A Language of Night’:
But sometimes the words touch the sense perfectly, and your heart stops for a moment in astonishment. I've stood on a mountain in Rum on a day when you could see forever, watched rainclouds moving over the hills of Orkney, and kissed someone on the strand of an island loch, and those moments come back when the right words are put together, despite how impossible that feels. Rather than saying anything else, I'll just leave you with one of the many new discoveries for me in this collection, from the Glaswegian composer John Purser:
Communing with the world in such places is a sort of poetry already, so this anthology of Scottish island verse feels like an example of using the right tools for the job. Even then, it is hard to find words to capture the feeling. Iain Crichton Smith writes of the ‘ancient daylight’; by early evening, Sheila Templeton sees ‘the moon still a wispy question / in a pale sky’; and later, Alison Prince watches as ‘dawn tears the black sky open / like a tangerine’. I loved the assonances and slowly retreating vowel sounds of WS Graham’s ‘Gigha’, which ends:
Quietly this morning beside the subsided herds
Of water I walk. The children wade the shallows.
The sun with long legs wades into the sea.
One sees simple things in a new way, as though for the first time, and the poetry struggles to capture such small moments and preserve them. Sometimes English itself feels clumsy compared to the dour trills and fricatives of Scots, as in something like Ann MacKinnon’s description of the Hebridean coast:
The watter skelps this dreich
shore and seamaws
greet fur mair, fur mair
abin the wave’s rair.
John Rice hears local languages as part of the natural world itself, in ‘A Language of Night’:
In the slap of wavelets,
in the flap of sails,
and in the lilac stillness of harbour waters,
I heard Gaelic…
and the moon and the scars
and the waves and the sails
and the waters of this storied otherworld
whispered in that soft, sad sea-tongue…
But sometimes the words touch the sense perfectly, and your heart stops for a moment in astonishment. I've stood on a mountain in Rum on a day when you could see forever, watched rainclouds moving over the hills of Orkney, and kissed someone on the strand of an island loch, and those moments come back when the right words are put together, despite how impossible that feels. Rather than saying anything else, I'll just leave you with one of the many new discoveries for me in this collection, from the Glaswegian composer John Purser:
NOVEMBER FROM THE CLACH RATHAD
The Canna lighthouse, smearing out the sky
of soft grey halfway indigo,
talks to Tex Geddes on the coast of Rum,
his masthead light now making steady north
for Soay harbour on a full flood tide:
a car – just headlamps on a hill –
plunges from skyline down to Tarskavaig,
and a daft dog in Drinan barks
at the sudden shadow of a black cow’s bulk;
a blackbird stutters and a snipe
startles along the shadowed ditch. It is the time
when searches are abandoned,
when the doe rabbit I stunned against a stone
shivers suddenly long past her death;
and the tilted landscape,
like a capsized sail, dips into the sea
of northern latitude so deep in indigo
it seems we’ll never right ourselves
before Orion swings into the dark
certain to hunt us down.
February 13, 2024
A beautiful book with poetry that moves you by the use of words, culture, history, descriptive images and the beauty of Scotland.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews