Peter Mackay seems to write poetry as he speaks. An island, he ponders, “can be seen as bounded by the sea or as infinitely connected”. He is interested in the parallels between Federico García Lorca’s Andalucía and “the wet deserts of the outer Hebrides”. Poetry, he believes, “can create whole worlds and make them matter”.
It is appropriate, then, that 45-year-old Mackay was announced yesterday as Scotland’s new makar, or national poet. He is the youngest makar to date, and the first one who writes primarily in Gaelic. He is “flabbergasted and delighted” by the honour, but also “slightly bemused,” he says.
