"MacGillivray’s The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is magnificent. It is neither violent or formal for its own sake, but rebels against complacent, lyrical histories in voices compressed to a haunting and haunted diamond precision. What vivid strangeness, for instance, to hear again the unsung recusant poet, Mary Queen of Scots, in our secular millennium? The chromatic lines balance splendidly on the razor-edge between imaginary and real time, making her a high modernist in the tradition of her great voice-walkers and forebears Burns, Scott, and MacDiarmid. You are holding in your hands a spell of sibylline leaves."—Ishion Hutchinson

'MacGillivray’s poems come at us with one language wearing the pelt of another, and in the affray that follows it is hard to tell whether dead or living mouth carries the fiercer bite. Blood-boltered, thrawn and unco, her work is a Samhain of unexorcised historical memory, ventriloquised with the ‘cognition of bone’. Here the blasted landscapes of the pre-forgotten present give way to the richer patternings of the tree alphabet, all under the sovereignty of our highland Orpheus, the executed Mary Queen of Scots. Not since Sorley MacLean hymned the woods of Raasay have the ghosts of the Gaelic past bestrode the present more imperiously.' – David Wheatley, on The Gaelic Garden of the Dead

‘The subtitle “An Astonishment of Fire” says all you need to know about MacGillivray’s book: this is explosive work. Ravage presents the life and work of invented Norwegian-Shetlandic poet Kristján Norge, who “vanished” from the Outer Hebrides in 1961. MacGillivray invites us to live and breathe Norge’s last days, demons and all.’ – Chris McCabe, Librarian, National Poetry Library, in The Bookseller (Autumn 2023 Highlights)

‘A toweringly original - multi-genre, documentary, polyphonic, heteroglossic - tour-de-force from MacGillivray, reminiscent of her The Last Wolf of Scotland in its unique and restless form and visionary imagination. No one else is writing like this. No one has ever written like this. Except maybe Kristjan Norge.’ – Steve Ely, Broken Sleep Books (Books of the Year 2023)

'Ravage meditates on a lost poet’s work. I sense that a grail of Norge’s complex creativity was gathered by Moncreiff; MacGillivray in turn carries it in this extraordinary vessel, as his co-choisiche (spirit co-walker) … Perhaps our place, in turn, is to allow ourselves astonishment. The forensic re-readings will follow, as questions rise from the saline ash.' – Beth McDonough, DURA (Dundee University Review of the Arts)

‘Combining the arcane scholarship of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1948) and the gothic horror of The Wicker Man (1973), MacGillivray’s Ravage speaks to us from an eerie and evanescent past [...] Brittly beautiful poems of “lucent pharography” perform insistent incantations, working the permutations of a metaphysical vocabulary of fire, ice, bone and ash […] A floridly compelling fantasia, [Ravage] opens an audacious portal into rarely glimpsed realms…’ – David Wheatley, The Times Literary Supplement

MacGillivray is the Highland name of writer and artist Kirsten Norrie. Her poetry and multi-disciplinary practice inhabits a rich artistic universe encompassing performance art, song-writing and the use of visual media such as sculpture and photography. She has published three other poetry books, The Last Wolf of Scotland (Red Hen, US, 2013), The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) and The Gaelic Garden of the Dead (Bloodaxe Books, 2019). Her non-fiction work, Scottish Lost Boys (as Kirsten Norrie), was published by Stranger Attractor/The MIT Press in 2018. Her other US connections include performing there with many musicians, including Thurston Moore and Arlo Guthrie. She had a fellowship at the Library of Congress which enabled her to spend time with Navajo and Hopi people in Arizona. In one of her performance pieces she walked in a straight line with a dead wolf on her shoulders through the back streets of Vegas into the Nevada desert. The Last Wolf of Scotland told the story of an early Scottish settler who suffered a scalping, and she recorded Sitting Bull’s great grandson reading from the book. She is currently working on an anti-Western, An American Book of the Dead, a novel set in New Mexico and the Scottish Highlands. She has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Cheltenham and Gloucester and Edinburgh College of Art. After living for many years in Edinburgh, she is now based in Oxford.

    11     Note on the Text
    13     Introduction by MacGillivray


I.  Optik: A History of Ghost
Kristján Norge, 1950 (ms 1.01)
    31     I. THE OCCLUDED
    38     II. THE OCCULTED
    41     III. THE OCULAR


II.  Ravage
Kristján Norge, 1961 (ms 1.02)

 

SPECULUM ANTE
    48     Mirror of Hope: Articulate Smoke
    49     I. Port nam Marbh
    51     Mirror of Smoke: Articulate Flame
    52     II. The Charred Arrow Shaft
    54     Mirror of Flame: Articulate Heat
    55     III. The Star-Ravaged Co(r)pse
    57     Mirror of Heat: Articulate Fire
    58     IV. الجبھة (Lunar Mansion X)
    60     Mirror of Fire: Articulate Wood
    61     V. Sequences for a Tariff
    62     Mirror of Wood: Articulate Charcoal
    63     VI. Knightless
    65     Mirror of Charcoal: Articulate Animal
    66     VII. Sump
    68     Animal Mirror: Articulate Trial
    69     VIII. Meat Spirit
    70     Mirror of Trial: Articulate Recall
    71     IX. Taghairm
    73     Mirror of Recall: Articulate Hope
    74     X. Legere

SPECULUM RETRO
The Dead Reckoning
    78     I. Celestial Metre: Wounded Boatman Decameter
    81     II. Celestial Metre: Wounded Hermit Pentameter
    82     III. Celestial Metre: Wounded Poet Tetrameter
    83     IV. Celestial Metre: Wounded Lion Pentameter
    85     V. Celestial Metre: Wounded Wolf Pentameter
    86     VI. Celestial Metre: Wounded Knight Trimeter
    87     VII. Celestial Metre: Wounded Gypsy Pentameter
    89     VIII. Celestial Metre: Wounded Demon Decameter
    90     IX. Celestial Metre: Wounded Centaur Hexameter
    92     X. Celestial Metre: Wounded Angel Tetrameter


III. The Lighthouse Papers
Kristján Norge (acc. 1.01)
    95     ‘An Aerial View of Hell’: typed first draft poem by Kristján Norge
    96     TRAN-Quil-Ity: typescript by Kristján Norge
    100     ‘Optik’ typescript by Kristján Norge
    101     Notes on ‘Optik’ typescript by Kristján Norge
    102     Dante & Tarot Systems typescript by Kristján Norge
    104     ‘Travails of a Spirit-Ravaged Skeleton’ typescript by Kristján Norge
    106     Celestial Metre workings (Popular Star Atlas) by Kristján Norge
    112     Eilean a’ Bhàis hand-drawn maps
    114     Photograph of lion skin wristband owned by Norge
    115     Photograph of MacGillivray’s ancestors crofting on Eilean a’ Bhàis
    116     Photograph of a fortune-telling card used by Norge
    117     Photograph of a slide of the Palatine or Alexamenos Graffito
    118     Photograph of Norge’s polished steel shaving-mirror
    118     Photograph of Norge’s Shetland wool knitting on bone needles
    119     Photograph of written scraps from Eilean a’ Bhàis Lighthouse
    121     Photograph of letter to Kristján Norge from Luce Moncrieff
    122     Photograph of pyrographic writing
    123     Photograph of pyrography set
    124     Photograph of Sluagh sequence outworking
    125     Photograph of Luce Moncrieff’s loom
    126     Excerpts from Kristján Norge’s loggbok

 

IV. Additional Materials
    131     Poet of the Underground City: essay by MacGillivray
    191     Fear Eun Lota: essay by MacGillivray

V. Appendix
    199     The Wind of Voices:
        based on the diary of Luce Moncrieff

    358     Ravage: a film
        with QR code and url for access

    359     Acknowledgements