"'O uilebheist mo dhomhain' (O monster of my world): An Rathad Cian le Ruaraidh MacThomais (Derick Thomson's The Far Road, 1970)'"
Abstrakt
In The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (2006), Michel Byrne praises Derick Thomson's third collection, An Rathad Cian (The Far Road, 1970), as ""the most extraordinary homage to place in Gaelic literature."" Given the widely acknowledged, conspicuous prominence of poetry about places in Gaelic literature, it is a large claim indeed. In my paper, I intend to take Michel Byrne's observation as my starting point and offer my own reflections supporting his claim.
The cycle of fifty-six poems is devoted entirely to Thomson's native Lewis and explores different aspects of the island, its history and people, and of the speaker's complex relationship to the place. I will contextualise the collection in the rich tradition of Gaelic writing about places - a tradition on which Thomson draws but from which he at the same time breaks away - and also in the poet's oeuvre, where it marks a distinct change in theme and form and closes one significant episode of Thomson's poetry.
The island is the subject of the poems and also the vehicle for poetic communication, as the imagery is almost exclusively local. The collection is thus, literally, all about Lewis: arguably, it is precisely this obsessive unity combined with an astonishing variety of imagery, tone and point of view that makes An Rathad Cian one of Thomson's major achievements and one of the peaks of modern Gaelic literature.