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  • Gordon Jarvie
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Gordon Jarvie

b.1941

Gordon Jarvie
POEMS BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gordon Jarvie was born in Edinburgh and educated at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Sussex, where he gained an MPhil in 1968. He has worked as a teacher and editor at Purdue University in the USA, as well as for publishers such as Collins and Oxford University Press. In the 1990s, he began to focus more on his poetry, and has since published two collections, Ayrshire Recessional (1998) and Time’s Traverse: Poems 1991–2001 (2002) and several pamphlets. A third collection was published in 2014; the full title is A Man Passing Through: memoir with poems selected and new (London: Greenwich Exchange).

Although most of Jarvie’s poetry is written in English, he has also produced work in Scots. His poems have appeared in Lallans, Poetry Scotland, The Herald, Northwords Now and Scottish Poetry in Translation among others.

More recently, he has collected his work in thematically focused volumes, such as Climber’s Calendar (Loose Scree, 2007), containing his hill poems, and the collection of Breton poetry, La Baudunais (Les Hauts-Fonds, 2009), his Fife poetry in Out and About Poetry Mainly from the East Neuk, Fife (2012), and his Irish poetry in Bessy Bell and Other Irish Intersections (2013).

For the National Museums Scotland, Jarvie edited the ‘Scottie Books’ series with his wife Frances, including Robert Burns in Time and Place (2009) and There Shall Be a Scottish Parliament (2013). Jarvie is also the editor of several poetry anthologies, including The Scottish Reciter (Blackstaff Press, 1993), The Kist Anthology (Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum, 1996), and 100 Favourite Scottish Poems to Read Out Loud (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2007).

As well as poetry, he has also written books on language, punctuation and etymology, notably the Bloomsbury Grammar Guide and Bloomsbury Dictionary of Idioms. He lives at Crail, in the East Neuk of Fife.

Read more

Read the poems

  • Cemetery By the Sea
  • Embro: Southside Ditties
  • Curtain
  • Loss
  • Yesterday in Laggan

Selected Bibliography

Retrospective (School of Poets, 1998)
Ayrshire Recessional (harpercroft, 1998)
Climber's Calendar (Harpercroft, 2001)
Time’s Traverse: poems 1991–2001 (Harpercroft, 2002)
Room for a Rhyme from Time to Time (Harpercroft, 2004)
Another Working Monday (Harpercroft, 2005)
The Tale of the Crail Whale and other poems (Harpercroft, 2006)
Climber’s Calendar, 2nd ed. (Loose Scree, 2007)
Poems, mainly from the East Neuk, Fife (Akros, 2007)
Watching the Sun and other poems (Harpercroft, 2008)
La Baudunais (Les Hauts-Fonds, 2009)
Now and Then Poetry, and an ould ballad (Harpercroft, 2010)
Out and About Poetry, mainly from the East Neuk, Fife (Harpercroft, 2012)
Withering into the Truth: poems from the rag-and-bone shop (Harpercroft, 2012)
Bessy Bell and Other Irish Intersections (2013)
A Man Passing Through: memoir with poems selected and new (Greenwich Exchange, 2014)
Endgame: poems new & used (Greenwich Exchange, 2016).

 

As editor: 

The Scottish Reciter (Blackstaff Press, 1993)
The Kist / A'Chiste [anthology] (Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum, 1996)
100 Favourite Scottish Poems to Read Out Loud (Luath Press, 2007).

 

From the Library Catalogue

Publications about Gordon Jarvie
Publications by Gordon Jarvie

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