Ben Dorain

"But what Gary MacKenzie has done, in this wonderful book, is to revivify that poem. He has created a new ‘inhabited music’ which springs McIntyre’s work into the present day. It’s not a translation, nor a modernised version, though there is that also. He has opened MacIntyre’s mountain poem like a geode, to use a geological term, and he has created an environmentally-aware, science-informed poetic counterpoint in English, which he presents dancing along with MacIntyre’s re-expressed eighteenth-century vision. Like the deer they so admire, the two poets’ lines leap back and forth across the page, across times, across languages, across species and poetic forms. It is a new work which alerts us to the tradition, which is to say, to the consciousness of the past. It calls this consciousness into the present, so that its wisdom might strengthen us for the environmental challenges to come." Kathleen Jamie, poet and essayist

Ben Dorain: A Conversation with a Mountain draws on the work of an eighteenth-century Gaelic poem by Duncan Ba n MacIntyre, rendering it into English.Where it does so, this is not to present MacIntyre's poetry per se to an English-language reader, as is customary with a translation or version.