
Dastram / Delirium samples the soaring verse of one of Scotland's pivotal poetic talents, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair. Formal innovation, political protest, revelry in nature, and erotic praise poetry are all contained here, the first full-length collection of Alasdair to appear in English in over a century. An Enlightenment mind and contemporary of Pope, Hume and Burke, his poetry should have been the indigenous genius Samuel Johnson and James Boswell sought out in their now-infamous literary tour through the Highlands and Islands. Though much-celebrated within his native Gaelic language, Alasdair's poetry is as much neglected outside of Gaelic. But now, in novel literary translations by Taylor Strickland, readers can re-visit his oeuvre and restore his name to the wider literary conscience.
PRAISE for Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair
The greatest of Scottish Gaelic poets
- Hugh MacDiarmid
Unconquerable... [he joins] titanic struggle with the naturalist realism in which eighteenth-century Gaelic poetry excels.
- Sorley MacLean
PRAISE for Taylor Strickland
After Garry MacKenzie's imaginative reinterpretation of Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain, Taylor Strickland reinvigorates another Gaelic icon, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair/Alexander MacDonald. More power to Taylor's elbow and long may the reimaginings continue.
- Rody Gorman