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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.
“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
“A work of imagination and scholarship. [Bowering] has clarified a lot of what was hidden and anybody researching Mary MacLeod and her work would do well to read this book. I highly recommend it.” Maoilios Caimbeul
“Part biography, part memoir, More Richly in Earth is an affecting read. Bowering’s rich language when describing the environment fascinates … Her capacity for compression and metaphoric extension in verse … enlivens her prose in an impressive, wide-ranging narrative.” Literary Review of Canada
“More Richly in Earth is short, rich, and nourishing. I recommend reading it slowly.” Northwords Now
“Bowering takes us through the glorious islands of Scotland as she wrestles academically, linguistically, and poetically with the contrary facts about gutsy Mary, the still cherished poet who was in and out of favour with various chieftains. Remarkable.” Canadian Writers Abroad