Between Mountain and Sea

Norman MacCaig was two men at once.

Edinburgh, the city where he was born and lived as a teacher and poet, was his home, but no other place shaped his poetry more than Assynt in Sutherland. It is here that he would spend many a summer on family holidays, walking the hills and fishing the lochs. MacCaig’s fresh eye saw remarkable newness even in the everyday and each poem is a tiny revelation, a new look at an old friend.

The poems in this collection focus on the Assynt landscape and people, reflecting MacCaig's lifelong love of the area and poetic inspirations he drew from it. Written over more than forty years, they illustrate one man's sustained and deeply felt engagement with a special place, and the people he found here.