This is a book about remoteness: a memoir of places observed in solitude, of the texture of life through the quiet course of the seasons in the far north of Scotland. It is a book grounded in the singularity of one place – a house in northern Aberdeenshire – and threaded through with an unshowy commitment to the lost and the forgotten. In these painterly essays Davidson reflects on art, place, history and landscape. "Distance and Memory" is his testament to the cold, clear beauty of the north.
About the Author
Peter Davidson was born in Scotland in 1957. He is currently Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Aberdeen. Peter has edited the "Clarendon Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe" (Vol I, 1998; II, 1999); the "Clarendon anthology of seventeenth-century English poetry", "Poetry and Revolution" (1998), and (with Jane Stevenson) "Early Modern Women's Poetry" (2001). He has also published numerous articles and studies of the post-reformation culture of British Catholicism, most recently in the monograph "The Universal Baroque" (Manchester University Press, 2007).
Reviews
"Peter Davidson has written a remarkable and unusual book – I have started the book but want to make it last the summer. It is a sustained prose poem, very moving in its effect... I am savouring it, reading it slowly, hoping to prolong the pleasure of these exquisite essays through the summer. It is, I think, ?one of the most beautiful books to be written in Scotland for many decades" – Alexander McCall Smith
"This is a poet's book, his mind wide open to the cultures of the world, especially of the north, specifically Aberdeenshire. The language is luscious, musical and precise, rich with quotation and the cultures of, especially, northern Europe, from minerology and industry to poetry, painting, music [...] The book glows with moments of light, on a city, a river, in a room" – Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales
"Peter Davidson's profoundly civilised and lyrical book is [...] shot through with exquisite poignancies. These have as much to do with the nature of the place – the nature of extreme northerliness – as with the author's finely trained eye. [...] he knows how to see into things, and not only the simply visible, but also the rituals, the inner structures, and music – Lieder and ballad at the piano – of a sequestered, professorial life in rural Aberdeenshire. [...] The stuff and pace of poetry underwrites Prof Davidson's nights and days. He has written a most remarkable book in the same class of accomplishment as the work of Robert Macfarlane, who introduces it" – Andrew McNeillie, Country Life
