A genuinely unique European treasure, this volume bristles with the Viking verses of Rognvaldr, Earl of Orkney, recorded in Orkneyinga Saga. Full of highly stylised, often grotesque images, Ian Crockatt's masterly translations convey the skill, vigour and daring of the original. Skaldic poetry is one of the most elaborate and original in European literature and this collection finally brings it to the deserved attention of the English-language reader. Rich narratives and old Norse mythology blend with familiar place-names and landscapes to create a peculiarly alluring, sometimes comic, world that never quite settles around the reader. Spirited and generous, these poems give us precious glimpses of a life lived to the full.

Egill Skallagrimsson was the most original, imaginative and technically brilliant of the Old Norse skalds, poets whose orally composed and performed verses were as much revered in ninth- to thirteenth-century Scandinavia as heroism in battle. Egill's saga details his life-story as well as those of his immediate predecessors, from whom he inherited his massive build, his early baldness (Skalla in his name means 'bald') and his exceptional ugliness. An arch enemy of Erikr Bloodax, he was a notoriously difficult man and, as many of the poems demonstrate, was lethal when crossed. But he also made poems which show he was capable of concern for others, as well as romantic love. Physical, direct, inventive, even transformative, Egill's poetry conjures up a territory far beyond the normal scope of language, something that only the finest poets achieve.

The poet Ian Crockatt has published two superb translations of Viking poetry with Arc- Crimsoning the Eagle's Claw: the Viking Poems of Rognvaldr Kali Kolsson, Earl of Orkney and The Song Weigher: the Complete Poems of Egill Skallagrimsson, Tenth Century Viking & Skald - and in this chapbook he uses the same highly-wrought form developed by the Skalds (the professional poets employed by the kings and earls of the Viking courts of the 9th to 13th centuries) to tell a quasi-Viking tale set in the landscapes and seascapes once under Viking control - the West Coast of Scotland where he used to live, and the north-east corner of Scotland where he now lives.

A series of 20 'early-memory' poems by award winning poet Ian Crockatt. The poems' vividly captured pictures focus on the intensity and physicality of a child's outdoor life in a Scottish village in the 1950s. The struggles and joys of boyhood in a large family, village life from a boy's perspective, friendship, fights, stirrings of sexual feelings - they are all here, brought to life in open, dynamically rhythmic verse which is both passionate about detail and satisfyingly universal. Not to be missed!