Overview

Mary MacLeod (Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh) was a rarity: a female bard in seventeenth-century Scotland. While her lyrics were honoured, she was also marginalized, denigrated as a witch, and exiled, both for being a writer and for what she wrote. Presented as a chronicle of journeys through the Scottish Hebrides, More Richly in Earth explores MacLeod’s legacy, preserved within landscape, memory, and identity. In an act of recovery and restoration, Canadian poet and novelist Marilyn Bowering pieces together the puzzle of radically different accounts of MacLeod’s life, returning to the places the bard once lived with the help of contemporary Scottish Gaelic poets and scholars. Through investigation and imagination, Bowering forms a connection with MacLeod despite vast differences of culture and language, time and place. Their connection deepens as Bowering twines MacLeod’s story with accounts of the people and places that shaped her own life, a connection that ultimately reveals the foundations of Bowering’s artistic vocation to herself. MacLeod’s life and writing, little known today beyond the Gaelic world, harbours cultural truths about a transformative era of war and colonization in Gaelic Scotland. Bringing a poetic sensibility to investigative scholarship, More Richly in Earth offers a profound reflection on the necessity of art in all forms.

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Reviews

“More Richly in Earth has an intricate structure, weaving together memoir, conversation, poetry, and literary investigation. As we accompany Bowering on her search for Mary MacLeod, we are released with her into mystery’s delight.” Jan Zwicky

“More Richly in Earth has an intricate structure, weaving together memoir, conversation, poetry, and literary investigation. As we accompany Bowering on her search for Mary MacLeod, we are released with her into mystery’s delight.” Jan Zwicky “Both grand in scale and gorgeously, lyrically intimate, More Richly in Earth holds readers close as they follow Bowering’s search for a myth-shrouded Scottish poet. Yet at its heart, it is something more powerful, more mysterious. As though faced with a great tree on some weathered headland, we are captivated by the skyward questing of its branches, as all the while its roots weave themselves down deep into the earth.” Patrick James Errington, author of the swailing

“More Richly in Earth has an intricate structure, weaving together memoir, conversation, poetry, and literary investigation. As we accompany Bowering on her search for Mary MacLeod, we are released with her into mystery’s delight.” Jan Zwicky “Both grand in scale and gorgeously, lyrically intimate, More Richly in Earth holds readers close as they follow Bowering’s search for a myth-shrouded Scottish poet. Yet at its heart, it is something more powerful, more mysterious. As though faced with a great tree on some weathered headland, we are captivated by the skyward questing of its branches, as all the while its roots weave themselves down deep into the earth.” Patrick James Errington

Author Information

Marilyn Bowering is a novelist, poet, and librettist; she is the author of four novels and numerous books of poetry. She is the winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Gwen MacEwen Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Prize, and the Dorothy Livesay Prize. She has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, the Prix Italia, and the Sony Award. Her work has been translated into numerous languages including Spanish, Finnish, German, Romanian, Russian, Greek, and Punjabi. In a review of her novel What it Takes to Be Human the Globe and Mail said of her ""[Bowering] does not seek moments to be brilliant: those moments just arrive."" Marilyn Bowering lives in Victoria, BC.

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