More Richly in Earth: A Poet’s Search for Mary MacLeod

Mary MacLeod (Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh) was a rarity: a female bard in seventeenth-century Scotland. While her lyrics were honoured, she was also marginalized, denigrated as a witch, and exiled, both for being a writer and for what she wrote. Presented as a chronicle of journeys through the Scottish Hebrides, More Richly in Earth explores MacLeod’s legacy, preserved within landscape, memory, and identity. In an act of recovery and restoration, Canadian poet and novelist Marilyn Bowering pieces together the puzzle of radically different accounts of MacLeod’s life, returning to the places the bard once lived with the help of contemporary Scottish Gaelic poets and scholars. Through investigation and imagination, Bowering forms a connection with MacLeod despite vast differences of culture and language, time and place. Their connection deepens as Bowering twines MacLeod’s story with accounts of the people and places that shaped her own life, a connection that ultimately reveals the foundations of Bowering’s artistic vocation to herself. MacLeod’s life and writing, little known today beyond the Gaelic world, harbours cultural truths about a transformative era of war and colonization in Gaelic Scotland. Bringing a poetic sensibility to investigative scholarship, More Richly in Earth offers a profound reflection on the necessity of art in all forms.

Marilyn Bowering is a poet, librettist, and novelist. She lives in Victoria, BC.