Mary MacLeod (M-i nighean Alasdair Ruaidh) was a rarity: a female bard in seventeenth-century Scotland. While her lyrics were honoured, she was also marginalized, denigrated as a witch, and exiled, both for being a writer and for what she wrote.
Presented as a chronicle of journeys through the Scottish Hebrides, More Richly in Earth explores MacLeod-s legacy, preserved within landscape, memory, and identity. In an act of recovery and restoration, Canadian poet and novelist Marilyn Bowering pieces together the puzzle of radically different accounts of MacLeod-s life, returning to the places the bard once lived with the help of contemporary Scottish Gaelic poets and scholars. Through investigation and imagination, Bowering forms a connection with MacLeod despite vast differences of culture and language, time and place. Their connection deepens as Bowering twines MacLeod-s story with accounts of the people and places that shaped her own life, a connection that ultimately
