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James Aitchison

1938 - 2023

James Aitchison
POEMS BIBLIOGRAPHY

James Aitchison was born in Stirlingshire in 1938 and educated at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities. He went on to publish several collections of poems and the critical study, The Golden Harvester: the vision of Edwin Muir and received a Gregory Award for the poems that formed the basis of his first collection, Sounds Before Sleep (1971), while in 1992 he won the Canadian Writing Wilderness award for the long poem, ‘Canada’, which appeared in Brain Scans (1998), the publication that began an interrogation into the nature of the mind, which remained a major subject within his poetics, along with an increasing interest in conservation and technology, often expressed with an anger at mankind’s failure to look after the world.

Formerly, a critic for The Scotsman and the Herald as well as a senior lecturer in the Department of Print Media, Publishing and Communication at Napier University, he wrote lucidly on the creative process and poetics, and his various publications include Cassell’s Dictionary of English Grammar, the textbook Writing for the Press: an introduction, and more recently, New Guide to Poetry and Poetics. 

Read the poems

  • Anthem
  • Creatures

Selected Bibliography

Poetry:

Sounds Before Sleep (London: Chatto and Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1971)
Spheres (London: Chatto and Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1975)
Second Nature (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1990)
Brain Scans (Edinburgh: Scottish Cultural Press, 1998)
Bird-score: twenty poems on birds (privately published, 2002)
Foraging: new and selected poems (Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2009)
The Gates of Light (Mica Press, 2016)
Learning How to Sing (Mica Press, 2018)
Edges (Mica Press, 2020)

Other works:

The Golden Harvester: the Vision of Edwin Muir(Aberdeen University Press, 1988)
Writing for the Press: an introduction 
(Oxford University Press, 1989)
The Cassell Dictionary of English Grammar (Cassell, 1996)
New Guide to Poetry and Poetics (Rodopi Editions, 2013)

From the Library Catalogue

Publications about James Aitchison
Publications by James Aitchison

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