Andrew McNeillie

ALAN Riach’s startling new book at once calls to mind, for its single-handed, multiple-minded virtuosity, Declan Kiberd’s brilliant study Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1996). If you haven’t read Kiberd, you should, but keep it back until you’ve bought and read Scottish Literature: An Introduction, in key and obvious ways, a very different kind of work from Kiberd’s, one in a class of its own.

THE single most distinctive move Hugh MacDiarmid makes in his “guide book” The Islands of Scotland (1939) concerns what he calls “Scotland’s greatest exclave”, the Shetland archipelago, which he prioritises over the Hebrides. Inspired by its difference, its exclusivity, he properly sets his ideological compass due North, on a Thulean trajectory, that reaches out to the civic and economic example of the Faeroes and to Norway. There was no box around his Shetland, a Shetland he tested against the old Norn words as they “hvarfed” (turned, disappeared, vanished) from him “in all directions” in the poem, “On a Raised Beach”.

BACK in September 2013, I began a Times Literary Supplement commentary essay (“A Scottish Siberia: Spying on Hugh MacDiarmid”) as follows: “There were few more dramatic adventures in the history of 20th-century modernism than Hugh MacDiarmid’s retreat to the Shetland islands from 1933 to 1942.” I went on to identify “further, suggestive examples of dramatic isolation in the modernist period” – from the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam at Voronezh to the American Ezra Pound (below) in his cage at Pisa, with the Irishman WB Yeats in his Tower and Bohemian-Austrian Rainer Maria Rilke at Duino in between, not quite in extremis in physical terms.

JOHN Millington Synge and Hugh MacDiarmid were very different but both wrote vital prose about, and made a poetry out of, islands. Synge’s prose is felt and expertly measured, though it began as journalism. His book The Aran Islands (1907) is a work of art, a masterpiece of the genre, a subtle exercise in the art of self-effacement; and, as WJ McCormack says in his life of the playwright, “a testimony to Synge’s unclassifiable intellect and imagination”.