I’ve been fortunate enough to have had a different kind of life. I was brought up by two writers who took me to magical places, far away from cities, to meet magical people. I spent my childhood searching for horse chestnuts and looking for otters. I wasn’t interested in electronic games and loud music: I wanted instead to be out in nature, watching for wild things and listening to the song of birds. It comes back to Iona, to this tiny little island on the west coast of Scotland which I will feel always is my spiritual home. In that place, I have everything I need. Nothing that a big city can offer tempts. Ever.
I wrote...
Iona: New and Selected Poems
By
Kenneth Steven
What is my book about?
Iona is a swirling together of all my best-known poems from 30 years of writing. It’s deeply spiritual: at the heart of the volume are all my poems inspired by Iona, the tiny Hebridean island off the west coast of Scotland to which St Columba came with Christianity in the 6th Century. Iona has been from childhood my spiritual home. It’s still the place where the best poems are born. It’s where I feel my faith at its deepest. When I walk here I feel I’ve gone out of time; I’ve left the modern world and all its horrors. I’ve gone into somewhere ancient and precious. I suppose more than anything it makes me feel like a child again.
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The Books I Picked & Why
Highland River
By
Neil M. Gunn
Why this book?
I choose this book because it gives me the most haunting sense of landscape and place. The author was from the northeast corner of Scotland and it was in his blood. I find it incredible that he’s able to capture it so deeply. We can feel these things, but to put them on paper is something else, a different skill. But somehow he manages to take you with him and to bring that landscape to life in the most incredible and powerful way. I suppose my greatest compliment to this book is that I wish I’d written it myself.
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Ring of Bright Water: A Trilogy
By
Gavin Maxwell
Why this book?
This is a work of non-fiction, and it’s my very favourite in the world. On one level it’s about a man who leaves the world behind and goes to live in the most remote corner he can find to live with a pet otter. But it’s about a whole lot more than that. Gavin Maxwell brings to life the sound of the birds and the crashing of the waves; you can smell the seashore beyond the door of the house and you can walk out onto the beach to see the beauty in every direction. It’s a love song to the natural world, that’s what it is. And if it doesn’t leave you moved, then you’re harder than stone.
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The Peace of Wild Things
By
Wendell Berry
Why this book?
I only discovered this masterpiece a year or so ago. I had been promising myself that I would read the work of Wendell Berry and I hadn’t got around to it. There’s no contemporary poet with such grace and simple beauty as this one. What I admire more than anything is that he doesn’t have to use big or difficult words to bring the world to life. Instead, he uses words a child would use and understand. But it’s what those pictures leave behind in our minds and hearts that are so incredible. It’s the gentleness and the grace of the giving that makes us see and feel everything he reaches out to caress with words.
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The Road
By
Cormac McCarthy
Why this book?
This is not a beautiful book: rather, it’s a profoundly moving book and a deeply disturbing one. And yet somehow it is beautiful too. Something terrible has happened to the world and a father and his son are walking further and further along the road towards somewhere, they don’t know what. Everything from the world they’ve known is lost and gone. But McCarthy describes with such beauty the love of a father for his son that it’s weepably fine. He touches something within us that’s about the core of our humanity. And in doing so, when we finish reading that book, we look about us with new eyes and have gratitude for all we’ve been given, for all that’s precious.
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The Knot of Vipers
By
Francois Mauriac
Why this book?
I studied this book at school and found myself coming back to it again and again long after I had grown into adulthood. It’s inspired by a part of France that the author knew well and loved deeply. It was a place of pine forests and great summer heat, and you can smell the trees and feel yourself in that landscape on every page of the work. The book is about an old man nearing the end of his life. He is not a good man nor a kind one: quite the reverse. And yet in these pages, there is redemption: he finds himself and he finds the peace he has longed for all the days of his life.
