Wow! eBook
Poems, Stories and Writings
Author(s): Margaret Tait (Author), Sarah Neely (Editor), Ali Smith (Foreword)
- Publisher: Fyfield Books
- Publication Date: 30 April 2012
- Language: English
- Print length: 186 pages
- ISBN-10: 1847771599
- ISBN-13: 9781847771599
Book Description
Margaret Tait (1918-1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. In ‘documentary’, she wrote, real things ‘lose their reality …and there’s no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens.’ If film, for Tait, was a poetic medium, her poems are works of craft and observation that are generous and independent in their vision of the world, poems that make seeing happen. Sarah Neely, Lecturer in Film at the University of Stirling, draws on Tait’s three poetry collections, her book of short stories, her magazine articles and unpublished notebooks to make available for the first time a collection of the full range of Tait’s writing. Her introduction discusses Tait as filmmaker and writer in the context of mid-twentieth-century Scottish culture, and a comprehensive list of bibliographic and film resources provides an indispensible guide for further exploration.
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Margaret Tait (1918-1999) was a filmmaker and writer. She published three books of poetry and two collextions of short stories (one of them for children) and made thirty-two short films and the feature-length Blue Black Permanent (1992). She was born in Orkney in 1918. After qualifying in Medicine from Edinburgh University in 1941, she joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving in India, Sri Lanka and Malaya, before returning to Orkney in 1946. She studied filmmaking in Rome from 1950-52, at the height of Neorealism. Returning to the UK, Tait established her own film company, Ancona films, working first in Edinburgh before returning to her native Orkney where she continued to make films until her death in 1999.
