The Hammer and The Fire
Following The Guidman’s Daughter with his poems on Mary, Queen of Scots, Marsh begins this new collection with a sequence exploring the life and times of John Knox, locating this ambivalent figure in the turmoil of the Scottish Reformation. Marsh moves via Kepler and Darwin into a celebration of nature, searching within our secular world to ‘find a language’ to render its mystery and concludes by touching on the great challenges we now face. Our striving to understand the nature of things hints, perhaps, at the possibility of a different kind of redemption.
Henry Marsh was born in Broughty Ferry and now lives in Midlothian. He began writing on the death of a friend, a Gaelic Bard, Donald MacDonald of South Lochboisdale. His first collection of poems, A First Sighting, was published in 2,005. Seven other collections have followed, A Turbulent Wake (2007), A Trail of Dreaming (2009), The Hammer and the Fire (2011), Wayfarers (2011), Painted Trees (2012), A Voyage to Babylon (2013), and The Bedrock, poems on themes from the Great Tapestry of Scotland (2015).
