“If you don’t get caught” : islands, isolation and entrapment in contemporary Scottish women’s poetry

Mackay, Peter

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Date

31/12/2020

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Abstract

This essay explores the trope of the island in recent Scottish poetry and in particular the tendency to treat poems as islands and vice versa. With a particular focus on the work of Meg Bateman, Jen Hadfield, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, and Liz Lochhead, the essay discusses ideas of entrapment, freedom, and isolation, to suggest that alongside the Utopian imaginings of islands, there is also the possibility of them becoming, like St Kilda for Lady Grange, constrictive prison cells.

Citation

Mackay , P 2020 , ' “If you don’t get caught” : islands, isolation and entrapment in contemporary Scottish women’s poetry ' , Contemporary Women's Writing , vol. Advance articles , vpaa022 . https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa022

Publication

Contemporary Women's Writing

Status

Peer reviewed

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa022

ISSN

1754-1476

Type

Journal article

Rights

Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the author created accepted manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa022

Collections

University of St Andrews Research

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10023/26660