Between Mountain and Sea: Poems From Assynt

‘Two Men at Once’ is one of Norman MacCaig best known poems. He was indeed two men at once: Edinburgh, the city where he was born and lived as a teacher and poet, was his home, but no other place shaped his poetry more than Assynt in Sutherland. It is here that he would spend many a summer on family holidays, walking the hills and fishing the lochs. MacCaig’s fresh eye saw remarkable newness even in the everyday and each poem is a tiny revelation, a new look at an old friend. This collection celebrates, renews, and rediscovers Norman MacCaig’s Assynt.

‘I have always loved the mixture of strictness and susceptibility in Norman MacCaig’s work. It is an on-going education in the marvellous possibilities of lyric poetry’ - Seamus Heaney

‘I have read or re-read every poem [in the Collected Poems], and I think it one of the greatest literary experiences of my life’ - Sorley MacLean

‘Whenever I meet his poems, I’m always struck by their undated freshness; everything about them is alive, as new and essential, as ever’ - Ted Hughes