More Richly in Earth: A Poet’s Search for Mary MacLeod

More Richly in Earth is a compelling exploration of the mystery of a 17th century Scottish Gaelic bard and her intersection with a Canadian poet. Mary MacLeod (Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh) was a 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. * from the readers’ reports: … a lovely, compelling contribution to our knowledge, awareness, and understanding of Mary and, perhaps most especially, to the potential for beauty and power within connections to the past …to the hidden stories within landscape; or to ourselves, and the layers of memory, feeling, and identity which are still always within our reach … it will have immense appeal to general readers with interests in Scottish history and culture, especially Highlands and Islands; in untold and marginalised histories of women; and in reflective nature and landscape writing. It also points to some connections between Mary’s work, context, and culture and issues of deep resonance within our present moment (indigenous rights; the environmental crisis; understanding of the complexity of personal identity more broadly) … it is beautifully written, with a striking combination of lucidity and depth. * This book is a major work: it deals in detail with the life and poetry of an important Gaelic poet of the 17th century; her place as a woman poet in a male-dominated society; it delves deeply into the nature of poetry, its sources and inspiration itself; makes correspondences between Canada and Scotland, particularly how her own journey as poet links to her childhood upbringing in British Columbia; it is a work of imagination and scholarship. Has she solved the mystery of Màiri Nighean Alasdair Ruaidh? Maybe not, but she 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 (Myles Campbell)