Men and Beasts: Wild Men and Tame Animals of Scotland

by Valerie Gillies, Rebecca Marr (Illustrator)

Come and meet some wild men and tame beasts. Explore the fleeting moment and capture the passing of time in these portrait studies which document a year's journey. Travel across Scotland with poet Valerie Gillies and photographer Rebecca Marr: share their passion for a land where wild men can sometimes be tamed and tame beasts can get really wild.

Among the wild men they find are a gunner in Edinburgh Castle, a Highland shepherd, a ferryman on the River Almond, an eel fisher on Loch Ness, a Borders fencer, and a beekeeper on a Lowland estate.

The beasts portrayed in their own settings include Clydesdale foals, Scottish deerhounds, Highland cattle, blackface sheep, falcons, lurchers, bees, pigs, cashmere goats, hens, cockerels, tame swans and transgenic lambs.

141 pages, Paperback

First published August 29, 2001

About the author

Valerie Gillies, née Simmons, (b. 1948) is a Canadian-born poet who grew up in Southern Scotland. She has an MA and an MLitt from the University of Edinburgh, where she wrote her thesis on William Drummond’s Flowres of Sion. She was also a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Mysore in India, which has continued to have an important impact on her poetry. She is married to William Gillies, Professor Emeritus of Celtic Languages and Literature at Edinburgh University, with whom she has three children, and they live in Edinburgh.

Gillies was the second Edinburgh Makar (Edinburgh's poet laureate) from 2005 to 2008. She has also written for literary and arts reviews, BBC radio and television, the theatre as well as worked with visual artists and musicians. She has also taught creative writing extensively.

Along with Will Maclean, William and Valerie Gillies collaborated on St. Kilda Waulking Song (1998), which features the poem by the same name in its original Gaelic and in a contemporary translation.