Wheatley, David: Child Ballad

Description

Wake Forest University Press, paperback

Publication Date: May 27, 2024

Publisher Marketing: In Child Ballad, his sixth collection, David Wheatley explores a world transformed by the poet’s experience of parenthood. Leading his children through the landscapes of Northern Scotland, he follows pathway laid down by departed Irish missionaries and wolves, and maps a rich landscape of rivers, trees and mountains. Stylistically, Child Ballad is a multifaceted book, drawing on influences from the Scottish ballad tradition to the Gaelic bards, French symbolism, and the Objectivists. Wheatley is an Irish poet in Scotland, but as a cultural corridor his Scotland is a space of migrations and palimpsests, holding different traditions in dynamic balance and fusion. Writing across geographical and historical distances as he often does, Wheatley hones an aesthetic of complex intimacy, alive to questions of memory and loss while communicating the ache of the here and now, as seen through the eyes of young children. A closing sequence on wildflowers and other fauna of the poet’s home in Aberdeenshire becomes an exercise in Orphic taxonomy, rippling outwards from the world of small flowers and mushrooms to a vision of deep history, geology, and ultimately the mysterious origins from which all art flows.