Book description
Margaret Tait (1918-1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words
and images made the world real. In 'documentary', she wrote, real
things 'lose their reality ... and there's no poetry in that. In
poetry, something else happens.' If film, for Tait, was a poetic
medium, her poems are works of craft and observation that are generous
and independent in their vision of the world, poems that make seeing
happen. Sarah Neely, Lecturer in Film at the University of Stirling,
draws on Tait's three poetry collections, her book of short stories,
her magazine articles and unpublished notebooks to make available for
the first time a collection of the full range of Tait's writing. Her
introduction discusses Tait as filmmaker and writer in the context of
mid-twentieth-century Scottish culture, and a comprehensive list of
bibliographic and film resources provides an indispensible guide for
further exploration.
'A writer whose openness of mind, voice and structure all come from
the Beats maybe, and Whitman crossed with MacDiarmid, but then cut their
own original (and crucially female) path. A remarkable critical
forerunner, a unique and underrated filmmaker, there's nobody like her.'
- Ali Smith 'The best 20th century Scottish female experimental poet and
film-maker that we have probably never heard about.' - The Literateur
Margaret Tait was born in Orkney in 1918. After qualifying in Medicine
from Edinburgh University in 1941, she joined the Royal Army Medical
Corps, serving in India, Sri Lanka and Malaya, before returning to
Orkney in 1946. She studied filmmaking in Rome from 1950-52, at the
height of Neorealism. Returning to the UK, Tait established her own film
company, Ancona films, working first in Edinburgh before returning to
her native Orkney where she continued to make films until her death in
1999.
