Stabs and Fences, and Later Poems
Published on 17. April 2012
Book
Paperback/Softback
132 pages
978-1-84921-075-1 (ISBN)
Description
This personal selection spans the poet's life and lived experience, drawing together poems previously published in a range of small-press publications and a section of hitherto uncollected poems. 'John Manson is a poet of rare integrity and distinction. This is a deeply impressive collection of lean, durable poems as firm in their positioning and place as the necessary stabs and fences required on croft or smallholding. When so much of the world is given over to the venality of celebrity-culture with all its superficiality and distractions, work of this kind is apt to be undervalued or overlooked entirely. Here there is a gathering of decades, spanning a writing life over more than half a century and crossing the whole stretch of Scotland.', Alan Riach in his Introduction to the volume.
Reviews / Votes
'...these poems are aa aboot humanity; its triumphs an its frailties. This is poetry o the heichest order.' Rab Wilson, Lallans 81. 'A collection spanning a lifetime's poetry, durable as John Manson's crofting, full of character and integrity. Here is poetry that is beautiful, certainly, but it's also a poetry to remind us always to think, about what we are, what we can be.' Northwords Now, Summer 2012More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Glasgow
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Zeticula Ltd
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
black and white
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
188 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84921-075-1 (9781849210751)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
John Manson was born in 1932 in Caithness where his parents were crofters. In his early twenties his mother and he moved to a croft in Sutherland, the county from which his great-grandmother had been cleared. He has also lived in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, Motherwell, Roxburghshire, Cumbria, Edinburgh, Fife, and for 37 years in Galloway. John's working life has been spent in crofting, reading/writing and teaching. Since early retirement he has focussed on research on Scottish authors of the 1930s, mainly Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and James Barke, as well as on translation of prose and poetry into English and of poetry into Scots. His publications include co-editorship with David Craig of the first Penguin paperback edition of Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Poems (1970); co-editorship of The Revolutionary Art of the Future: Rediscovered Poems by Hugh MacDiarmid, with Dorian Grieve and Alan Riach (Carcanet Press, 2003). And he selected and edited Dear Grieve: Letters to Hugh MacDiarmid (Kennedy and Boyd, 2011).