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It will come as a very pleasant surprise to Nan Shepherd’s growing following that there is a body of her work which has never been published in book form, and indeed will be entirely unknown outside a very small circle. The editor of this volume, Charlotte Peacock, found many of these gems when researching for the Nan Shepherd biography Into the Mountain, published by Galileo in 2017.
The pieces that Peacock found include a brilliant and moving 10,000 word short story, “Descent from the Cross”; a series of ‘field writings’ which were written at the same time, and in the same style as, The Living Mountain; 15 poems, never seen before; a highly entertaining piece on the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid and, from where the title of this collection arises, a haunting description of “Wild Geese in Glen Callater” a version of which also went into The Living Mountain.
Nan Shepherd
Nan Shepherd (1893-1981) was a Scottish writer, educator, and poet. An intrepid hiker throughout her life, she spent hundreds of days and journeyed countless miles on foot in the Caingorms of Scotland. She published three novels--The QuarryWood, The Weatherhouse, and A Pass in the Grampians--and a volume of poetry--In the Cairngorms--in an extraordinary six-year burst between 1928 and 1934. After a period of creative silence, she composed The Living Mountain during the Second World War. However, the manuscript was stashed away in a drawer for nearly four decades before its publication in 1977.
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