The Collected Works of Kenneth White, Volume 1: Underground to Otherground

These three books reflect the beginnings of one of the most radical and exhilarating figures in modern literature

Incandescent Limbo recounts White’s years in Paris. Many a writer in the modern era had made Paris a focal point of his or her activity, but probably no one made more of it or got more out of it than Kenneth White. While exploring a labyrinthine underworld, the book is fundamentally an autoanalysis and traces the birth of the writer as an intellectual nomad.

Letters from Gourgounel takes us from the city to a wild part of south-eastern France, the Ardèche, where White undertakes a resourcing in an elementary context. Hailed in England as a ’fascinating curiosity of literature’, this book not only made White famous overnight in France, it was seen there as a turning point in the contemporary situation.

In the third book, Travels in the Drifting Dawn, the intellectual nomad begins his moves across territories and cultures. After passing through the London underground of the sixties, then delving into the ground of his native Scotland and neighbouring Ireland, we shift back to the Continent, accumulating experience on different levels in France, Spain, Belgium, Holland, before concluding the cycle in North Africa. The trilogy is not only a summary of White’s itinerary in its initial stages, it opens up a whole intellectual and cultural programme.

Kenneth White is a Scottish poet, academic and writer. He has published numerous works of poetry and prose, with volumes and essays in French as well as English. His work has also been translated into several languages. He is the recipient of many awards and honours, in Europe and Scotland, including the Grand Prix du Rayonnement Français by the Académie française for his work as a whole (1985), the Édouard Glissant prize from the University of Paris VIII for his ’openness to the cultures of the world’ (2004) and Prix de poésie Alain Bosquet for Les Archives du Littoral, a bilingual poetry collection (2011). White holds honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh and the Open University and is an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy. In 1989 he founded the International Institute of Geopoetics to promote further research into the cross-cultural, trans-disciplinary field of study which he had been developing during the previous decade. It has since produced six Cahiers de Géopoétique (journals) in French, publishing a range of work on geopoetics from throughout the world. Geopoetics Centres have since been set up in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Serbia, Quebec, New Caledonia and France. His publications in English include, Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath (Aberdeen, 2013), The Wanderer and his Charts (Polygon, 2004), Open World: The Collected Poems 1960-2000 (Birlinn, 2003), House of Tides (Polygon, 2000). He lives on the north coast of Brittany.

Cairns Craig is Director of the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. His books include Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry (1982), Out of History (1996), The Modern Scottish Novel (1999), Associationism and the Literary Imagination (2007). He was general editor of the four-volume History of Scottish Literature (1987-9) and has been on the editorial boards of Cencrastus, Radical Scotland, Edinburgh Review and the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies.