Dain Do Eimhir: Poems for Eimhir (English and Scots Gaelic Edition) [Paperback]

Sorley Maclean (Author), Christopher Whyte (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 2002

MacLean's finest work is to be found in the sequence of themed poems, "Dain Do Eimhir agus Dain Eile"/ "Poems to Eimhir" and "Other Poems" (1943). Written mostly during the 1930s, the sequence consists of forty-eight love poems addressing a universal 'eimhir', or woman. At the heart of the poems is a sense of lamentation for lost love and opportunity yet they are also sharply political.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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About the Author

Sorley MacLean was born on the island of Rasaay in 1911. He was brought up within a family and community immersed in Gaelic language and culture, particularly song. He studied English at Edinburgh University from 1929, taking a first class honours degree Despite this influence, he eventually adopted Gaelic as the medium most appropriate for his poetry. He translated much of his own work into English, opening it up to a wider public. During the Spanish Civil War MacLean was torn between family commitments and his desire to fight on behalf of the International Brigades. He eventually resigned himself to remaining on Skye. He fought in North Africa during World War Two, before taking up a career in teaching, holding posts on Mull, in Edinburgh and finally as Head Teacher at Plockton High School. Amongst other awards and honours, he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1990. He died in 1996 at the age of 85. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 306 pages
• Publisher: Association for Scottish Literary Studies (May 3, 2002)
• Language: English, Scots Gaelic
• ISBN-10: 0948877502
• ISBN-13: 978-0948877506
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,019,899 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Whyte's contributions are more interesting than the source., March 15, 2005

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Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dain Do Eimhir: Poems for Eimhir (English and Scots Gaelic Edition) (Hardcover)

Sorley MacLean, Dain do Eimhir (University of Glasgow Press, 2002)

Actually, I shouldn't be attributing this book to Sorley MacLean. Of its two hundred seventy-four pages, less than an hundred were actually written by MacLean. Christopher Whyte, the editor of the book, wrote most of it. And in its way, it's rather an impressive thing. How does one write six pages of commentary on one line of a poem?

But the central piece of the book is MacLean's "greatest achievement" (as per the cover), the poem cycle Dain do Eimhir (Poems to Eimhir-- Eimhir, by the by, being the wife of Cuchulainn). And thus the obvious question follows. How are the poems?

The concise answer to that question is "unpoetic." MacLean obviously did not come from the "show, don't tell" school of thought. (Whyte realizes this, at least subconsciously, as he attributes some of the difficulties of translating some of MacLean's poems to the frequency with which MacLean uses abstract nouns; abstraction, of course, is anathema to poetry.) MacLean is constantly talking about how beautiful his addressee(s) is(are), but the only concrete detail about her/them we ever get is hair color. (In fact, Whyte's assertion that there's more than one Eimhir stems solely from this one detail.) Poetry doesn't tell us something is beautiful, poetry shows us something is beautiful. Otherwise, it's prose (and unacceptably vague prose, at that) chopped up into short lines, whether it rhymes or not.

Mildly interesting for the scholarship Whyte attaches, but the poetry, well, isn't. **