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MacGillivray is the Highland name of writer and artist Kirsten Norrie. Her poetry and multi-disciplinary practice inhabits a rich artistic universe encompassing performance art, song-writing and the use of visual media such as sculpture and photography. She has published three other poetry books, The Last Wolf of Scotland (Red Hen, US, 2013), The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) and The Gaelic Garden of the Dead (Bloodaxe Books, 2019). Her non-fiction work, Scottish Lost Boys (as Kirsten Norrie), was published by Stranger Attractor/The MIT Press in 2018. Her other US connections include performing there with many musicians, including Thurston Moore and Arlo Guthrie. She had a fellowship at the Library of Congress which enabled her to spend time with Navajo and Hopi people in Arizona. In one of her performance pieces she walked in a straight line with a dead wolf on her shoulders through the back streets of Vegas into the Nevada desert. The Last Wolf of Scotland told the story of an early Scottish settler who suffered a scalping, and she recorded Sitting Bull's great grandson reading from the book. She is currently working on an anti-Western, An American Book of the Dead, a novel set in New Mexico and the Scottish Highlands. She has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Cheltenham and Gloucester and Edinburgh College of Art. After living for many years in Edinburgh, she is now based in Oxford.
MacGillivray’s poems come at us with one language wearing the pelt of another, and in the affray that follows it is hard to tell whether dead or living mouth carries the fiercer bite. Blood-boltered, thrawn and unco, her work is a Samhain of unexorcised historical memory, ventriloquised with the ‘cognition of bone’. Here the blasted landscapes of the pre-forgotten present give way to the richer patternings of the tree alphabet, all under the sovereignty of our highland Orpheus, the executed Mary Queen of Scots. Not since Sorley MacLean hymned the woods of Raasay have the ghosts of the Gaelic past bestrode the present more imperiously. -- David Wheatley * on The Gaelic Garden of the Dead * Occulted, fire-warped, close-stitched in freshly butchered skin, MacGillivray's keening rant is prophecy, hot and plain. A sequence of cards dealt in the wake of shamanic seizures that happen, and happen again, only because the poet insists on their ghostly witness. Here are songs of fierce tenderness and subtle cruelty. They sting in salt like a Highland curse. I relish every breath of the fall and crush. -- Iain Sinclair * on The Nine of Diamonds * 'Violent and formal' – the phrase is John Berryman’s – in a language both lupercal and arboreal, MacGillivray’s The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is magnificent. It is neither violent or formal for its own sake, but rebels against complacent, lyrical histories in voices compressed to a haunting and haunted diamond precision. What vivid strangeness, for instance, to hear again the unsung recusant poet, Mary Queen of Scots, in our secular millennium? The chromatic lines balance splendidly on the razor-edge between imaginary and real time, making her a high modernist in the tradition of her great voice-walkers and forebears Burns, Scott, and MacDiarmid. You are holding in your hands a spell of sibylline leaves. -- Ishion Hutchinson
