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The Cleansing of the Knife and Other Poems
72 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1978
About the author
Naomi Mitchison
160 books148 followersNaomi Mitchison, author of over 70 books, died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was born in and lived in Scotland and traveled widely throughout the world. In the 1960s she was adopted as adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. Her books include historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, autobiography, and nonfiction, the most popular of which are The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Conquered, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.
Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.
Praise for Naomi Mitchison:
"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer
"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly
"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement
"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts
"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation
Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.
Praise for Naomi Mitchison:
"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer
"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly
"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement
"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts
"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 1, 2023
"Dark stand the centuries
Of ill days for the Highlands
Tears in the glen, tears
For oppression of all kinds:
For the chief’s targes and spears
As the stag goes by with his hinds,
And there’s courage and song and laughter
And the plaids go swirling wide;
But the common man must hunt
For the black shells in the sea-weed
Between a tide and a tide."
Of ill days for the Highlands
Tears in the glen, tears
For oppression of all kinds:
For the chief’s targes and spears
As the stag goes by with his hinds,
And there’s courage and song and laughter
And the plaids go swirling wide;
But the common man must hunt
For the black shells in the sea-weed
Between a tide and a tide."
October 22, 2019
Wonderful....
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews