Distance and Memory

Overview

Following in the successful nature-writing style of Robert MacFarlane and Gillian Clarke, Distance and Memory is a book about remoteness: a memoir of places observed in solitude, of the texture of life through the quiet course of the seasons in the far north of Scotland. It is a book grounded in the singularity of one place—a house in northern Aberdeenshire—and threaded through with an unshowy commitment to the lost and the forgotten. In these painterly essays Peter Davidson provides his testament to the cold, clear beauty of the north and reflects on art, place, history, and landscape.

Reviews

“A masterpiece . . . beyond being merely clever or wise: a beautiful book.”  —Scottish Review of Books

“This is a poet’s book, his mind wide open to the cultures of the world, especially of the north, specifically Aberdeenshire. The language is luscious, musical and precise, rich with quotation and the cultures of, especially, northern Europe, from minerology and industry to poetry, painting, music. . . . The book glows with moments of light, on a city, a river, in a room.”  —Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales

Author Biography

Peter Davidson is a professor of Renaissance studies at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of The Idea of North, The Palace of Oblivion, and The Universal Baroque; the editor of Poetry and Revolution and The Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe; and a coeditor of The Collected Poems of Robert Southwell and Early Modern Women's Poetry.