Two new publications devoted to the work and life of Poet Alastair Mackie, 1925-1995.
Alastair Mackie: New Collected Poems and Discontinuities, both edited by Christopher Rush, have been published by AUP.
Alastair Mackie: New Collected Poems includes over a hundred new poems identified in Mackie’s manuscripts by Christopher Rush, a former of student of his, who has edited the volume from Mackie’s published works and previously unpublished materials.
Mackie’s Journals and Poetic Notebooks (under Mackie’s own preferred title, Discontinuities), consists of a previously unpublished diary that the poet kept from the 1940s until a few days before his death in 1995. Discontinuities contains many drafts of poems and stories, together with Mackie’s responses to and translations from the work of a wide range of Europeans poets, both classical and contemporary. Some of these are published for the first time in the ‘Translations’ section of the New Collected Poems.
Aberdonian, working class, Doric speaker, Mackie served on a minesweeper in WWII before becoming a schoolteacher – first in Orkney and then in Fife. His poetry is full of humanity, wit and observation as all the while Mackie, inspirational teacher and driven poet, struggled with depression.
Both volumes, Alastair Mackie: New Collected Poems and Discontinuities not only enhance Mackie’s already growing reputation as a poet in both Scots and English but will provide significant responses by a major Scottish poet to the cultural and political situation of Scotland in the second half of the twentieth century.
Alastair Mackie: New Collected Poems (edited by Christopher Rush) £35. Purchase here
Discontinuities (edited by Christopher Rush) £40. Purchase here