Description

Robert Rendall is a poet with the purity of the light that falls on his northern island home. He had the ability of expressing deep insight with great lucidity, writing of the fisherman on the sea, the farmer in his fields, and the memories of the retired master-mariners who once sailed round Cape Horn. But as this first-ever anthology of this work shows, he was influenced in these themes by national and international literary and cultural movements, and above all by the poets of Classical Greece.

He turned his talents to archaeology, to art, to theology, to travel-writing, and to the marine biology of the shores of the Orkney Islands and the seas around. Among all these wide-ranging explorations he always found time for his friends and family, in a life full of warmth and tranquility and happiness.

This book contains the first biography of Robert Rendall to appear, and it sets him within Orkney’s twentieth-century literary renaissance, a Golden Age of island learning. The selections from his poetry, prose and letters, with a foreword by his fellow-islander George Mackay Brown, establish his place in Scottish literature.