The Island in the Sound

by Niall Campbell

Overview

The Island in the Sound, the third collection by Scottish poet Niall Campbell, creates an archipelago of memories, lyrics, observations and folktales that place the small islands of his birthplace into conversation with moments from literature and history.

In this collection, mirroring the islands’ precarious future, we uncover strange links to Rome falling, Lindisfarne, and the temporary heaven found in Alamut, North Iran. The waters that churn around the islands in the poems bring strange things to their shores: saints, remnants of various types of havens, crab-boxes, and figures from the working-class lives of Uist. It is a poetry collection attuned to the growing sense that something is changing around us and there never will be a going back. These islands in the sound are what’s left: shaped, crafted, riven by the strange tuneful sea they sprang from.

Niall Campbell’s first collection, Moontide (2014), won both the £20,000 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and the Saltire First Book of the Year Award as well as being shortlisted for three other major prizes. First Nights: poems, a selection from Moontide with additional new poems, was published by Princeton UniversityPress in the US in 2016. His second collection, Noctuary (2019), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Born and raised on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, he now lives in Fife. He is editor of the leading UK poetry journal Poetry London.

Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2024

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780377216
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	11/05/2024
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Niall Campbell was born in 1984 on the island of South Uist, one of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and an Arvon-Jerwood Mentorship in 2013, and won the Poetry London Competition in 2013. His first book-length collection, Moontide (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), won what was then Britain’s biggest poetry prize, the £20,000 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, as well as the Saltire First Book of the Year Award; it was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. First Nights: poems, a selection from Moontide with additional new poems, was published by Princeton UniversityPress in the US in 2016. His second book-length collection, Noctuary (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He wrote the libretto for Draught, an opera by Anna Appleby, which was performed by the BBC Philharmonic in 2022. He now lives in Fife, Scotland.

Table of Contents

Part I
    13     ‘I am so Happy. I am so Happy. I Loved my Life’
    14    Apprenticeship
    15     Island Sonnets: Fugay
    16     The Sparrow’s Legs
    17     The Night Birds
    18     Inside the Trojan Horse: A War Poem
    19     Tongues of Water
    20     Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage, letter 3
    22     After the Language Deprivation Experiment
    25     A Man Carrying His Own Door
    26     The Night Auditor
    27     Hamelin
    28     Morning Lessons
    29     Three Folk-tale Characters Who Are Definitely Not Metaphors for the Poem
    32     Island Sonnets: Delos
    33     The Death of the Birds
    34     They Have Crept Down,
    35     Barn Owl on Newburgh Road
    36     Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage, letter 6
    37     A Car for Jacob
    38     Island Sonnet: Eriskay
    39     The Cockle-picker
    40     The Salmon of All Knowledge
    42     The Islander as a Theatre Barman Before the Ballet
    43     An Afterlife of Those Who Build
    44     The Flesh Tree
    45     Island Sonnets: Sandy Island
    46     Theology
    47     Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage, letter 4
    48     The Cured
    50     Pastimes
    51     Island Sonnets: Lingay
    52     Learning to Drink Seawater
    53     Lighthouse Keeper, Believing
    54     The Gift

Part II
    57     Life Mask of William Blake
    58     The Harpy of Rubha Meall Nan Caorach
    61     Listening to the Accent of Borges
    62     Houdini
    63     Beginnings
    65     Island Sonnets: The Poem
    66     The Burning of the Bridge
    67     After the Ending of the World
    68     First Fires
    69     From the Devil’s Songbook
    70     Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage, letter 2
    71     Island Sonnets: Mingulay
    72     The Egg Gatherers of St Kilda
    73     The End of Heaven
    75     On the Deep Ocean
    76     Mouse
    77     Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage, letter 1
    78     Rosemary
    79     On the Bone Oracles
    80     Wildness
    81     Lighthouse Keeper, Doubt
    82     Island Sonnets: The Shadow
    83     What is the Poem?
    84     Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage, letter 8
    86     Blackbird Psalm
    87     The Transformed Fight
    88     The Windows
    89     The Nine Billion Names
    91     The Sound

    93     Acknowledgements
    95     Biographical note

Editorial Reviews

02/17/2025

In his meditative third collection, Campbell (Noctuary) brings to vivid life the land and sea that defined his youth in the Outer Hebrides, interweaving references to ancient myths and the effects of climate change on the natural world and its inhabitants. There are several thematic series in the collection, including poems centered around jobs the speaker once held on the islands. “Apprenticeship” describes the work of sorting the catches of crabbers: “Hours, you would weigh/ by hand and eye and a slow part of the mind,// young jeweller at a tray of breathing stones.” Many poems feature animals—the threat against them, but equally their remarkable endurance—and there is an abiding Blakean metaphysics throughout, as in “Theology”: “I would explain the soul like this:/ as whisky in the barrel cask—/ that light caught. Grained, proofed, stored and kept/ bound in a dark in wonderment.” While the subject matter can be bleak, an existential exuberance permeates, the tone set by the opening poem, which quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins’s last words: “I am so Happy. I am so Happy. I Loved my Life.” As long as there is life on Earth, there is beauty to admire and reason to persevere, Campbell suggests. This offers an essential glimmer of hope in the dark night of the late Anthropocene. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

'Niall Campbell to me reveals a rare poetic sensibility, and joyous wordsmith...allied to a singular sensitivity to mood and atmosphere. His muscular phrasing and seductive cadences give his poems a burnished quality; while his perceptions of the natural world here predominantly the land and seascape of Uist - and that of myth...interwoven with insight into his workings as a poet...instil a recurring sense of wonder.' - Stewart Conn, Edwin Morgan Poetry Award judge

'The poems in the book place his Hebridean homeland in an ever-shifting mosaic of tidal gifts, memories, folklore, conversations and people. Always there is an awareness of the sea that surrounds, that change is constant, and that there is no going back.’ – The Scotsman, Poem of the Week, on The Island in the Sound

‘Niall Campbell’s poem of love and identity finds the perfect metaphor for a sense of collective spirituality in the protean ebb and flow of the tide.’ – Steve Whitaker, Poem of the Week, Yorkshire Times, on ‘Tongues of Water’ from The Island in the Sound

‘Here are poems which pinpoint various types of ephemerality in the evolution and dissolution of ties and identities. [...] Campbell manages to voice both universal and specific instances of lost identity – be it the Trojan War, the ‘secret garden’ in 1092, or the islands’ ancient people: the cocklepickers, egg gatherers, Lighthouse keepers;’ – Hannah Stone, The Lake, on The Island in the Sound

From the Publisher