These Islands, We Sing

Book review published in The Shetland Times

This landmark anthology is the first to focus solely on modern poetry from the Scottish islands. Such novelty is rather unusual, for these places have been home to a vast proportion of the nation’s greatest writers - Edwin Muir, Sorley MacLean, George Mackay Brown and Hugh MacDiarmid, are among a host of famous island poets who feature heavily in the Scottish literary canon. Yet, while these figures are rightly recognised for their authority, their counterparts in the present are too often overlooked by a publishing industry rooted in Scotland’s urban centres of influence and power. 

“Scottish island poets are the sidelined of the sidelined. To the wider UK media and education system, the islander exists as an afterthought”, contends editor Kevin MacNeil in his introduction. In the collection which follows, he addresses the problem by steering a course through the landscape of Scottish islands poetry from the 20th and 21st centuries. The result is a rich and diverse anthology of old and new voices from across the margins of the nation.

In this context Shetland is a big island; one third of the book is devoted to the work of local poets, which is a great testament to the vitality of our own literary tradition.

This space allows the work of well established figures, such as T.A Robertson (Vagaland), Lollie Graham and Stella Sutherland to sit comfortably alongside that of more recent arrivals, including Jen Hadfield, Jim Mainland, Alex Cluness, Lise Sinclair and Mark Ryan Smith. Best of all, their arrangement among poets from Scotland’s other marginal places allows for new connections to be made between writers and their islands. 

Themes of love, space and place run throughout. Many of these are shared between poets and their respective islands, while others are rendered according to the individual conditions and traditions that belong to each writer and place. 

The Gaelic poets for example, like those who write in the Shetland dialect or standard English, are concerned with the same things: belonging, extremes of weather and geography, love and isolation. All the while, the distinctive language employed in much of the work highlights the importance of a culture being able to speak in its own tongue.

As a man born and raised on Lewis, and twice resident of Shetland, MacNeil knows his islands well. He also knows a thing or two about literature. An award-winning poet, novelist and playwright, he has held a number of prestigious writing residencies, both in the UK and abroad. Such credentials will only be strengthened as These Islands, We Sing finally allows Scottish island poetry to be seen among the best of the nation’s modern literature.

These Islands, We Sing: An Anthology of Scottish Island Poetry is published by Polygon in hardback, priced £14.99