WITH A FOREWORD BY ROBERT MACFARLANE This 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 Davidson reflects on art, place, history and landscape. Distance and Memory is his testament to the cold, clear beauty of the north.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘I am savouring it, reading it slowly, hoping to prolong the pleasure of these exquisite essays through the summer. It is, I think, one of the most beautiful books to be written in Scotland for many decades.’ –Alexander McCall Smith
‘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.’ –Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales
‘[Davidson] writes, we might say, in a northern vernacular, exactly responsive to its region, in which the specifics of terrain and weather are internalised as a kind of grammar. It is a style fine in its granulation, subtle in its shading and stricken throughout by a gentle melancholy.’ –Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways
This week we’re raving about Peter Davidson’s new book Distance and Memory, a gorgeous piece of writing about place, in this case the north of Scotland. Robert Macfarlane is a big fan so it must be good. –Herald Magazine
About the Author
PETER DAVIDSON was born in Scotland in 1957 and is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of the topographical book The Idea of North (Reaktion, 2005); a monograph on the internationalism of the seventeenth century, The Universal Baroque (MUP, 2007); and a collection of poems, The Palace of Oblivion (Carcanet, 2008).
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