Kirjahaku

Born on the Orkney island of Wyre in 1887, Edwin Muir settled in various parts of Europe during the first half of the twentieth century - from Glasgow, to Austria and Czechoslovakia throughout to 1920s, 1930s and again after the war. Muir's poetry bears oblique witness to the most traumatic years and events of this century, and is haunted by the symbolic 'fable' which he longed to find beneath the surface 'story' of mere events, as he came to terms with his own nature amidst the terror and confusion of the European maelstrom. As Seamus Heaney has written: 'Muir's poetic strength revealed itself in being able to co-ordinate the nightmare of history with that place in himself where he had trembled with anticipation . . . His simultaneous at-homeness and abroadness is exemplary.'

Edwin Muir - POOR TOM, J.F. Hendry - FERNIE BRAE, Gordon M. Williams - FROM SCENES LIKE THESE, Tom Gallacher - APPRENTICE.Growing Up in the West presents four very different and memorably vivid accounts of what it was to be young and growing up in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, from the 1930s to the 1960s.Poor Tom tells of a young man's struggle to come to terms with the slow death of his brother in the city slums of a culturally impoverished Scotland. Fernie Brae celebrates the growth and education of a sensitive in a novel reminiscent of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Gordon Williams's novel tells a grimmer story as its young protagonist eventually succumbs to a culture of drink and violence where the harshness of life on the land sits next to industrial sprawl: 'From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs.' Set in the Clydeside shipyards, the wryly observant and humorous style of Apprentice strikes a happier note from the 1960s.