Shepherd, N: In the Cairngorms

Nan Shepherd (1893-1981) was born in Peterculter, near Aberdeen. After graduating from the University of Aberdeen in 1915 (which awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1964), she taught English at the College of Education until her retirement in 1956. Between 1928 and 1933 she published three novels - The Quarry Wood, The Weatherhouse and A Pass in the Grampians - set in small communities in the north-east of Scotland. Her reputation grew further with the 1977 publication of The Living Mountain, now widely regarded as a classic of landscape writing.

First published in 1934, In The Cairngorms is Nan Shepherd's only book of poems. Although she wrote three acclaimed novels, and a remarkable prose meditation on the Cairngorms entitled The Living Mountain, Shepherd considered her poetry to have been her finest work. It took her twenty-five years to write these forty-six poems. Each is possessed of a fierce intensity; together, they offer glimpses into what she once called "the burning heart of life". Shepherd's lifelong acquaintance with the Scottish mountains was a spiritual as well as a geographical exploration: in the Cairngorms she discovered both elemental beauty and profound metaphysical mystery. Her huge gifts as a poet were to convey these discoveries in language that remains both strange and thrilling to the modern reader. As Robert Macfarlane observes in his foreword to this new edition of the poems - the first for eighty years - Shepherd was someone who lived "all the way through", and who relished "the feel, sight, scent and sounds of the world." The phrase engraved on her memorial stone in Edinburgh catches the joy and generosity with which she approached existence: "It's a grand thing to get leave to live".