"MacGillivray’s The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is magnificent. It is neither violent or formal for its own sake, but rebels against complacent, lyrical histories in voices compressed to a haunting and haunted diamond precision. What vivid strangeness, for instance, to hear again the unsung recusant poet, Mary Queen of Scots, in our secular millennium? The chromatic lines balance splendidly on the razor-edge between imaginary and real time, making her a high modernist in the tradition of her great voice-walkers and forebears Burns, Scott, and MacDiarmid. You are holding in your hands a spell of sibylline leaves."—Ishion Hutchinson
'MacGillivray’s poems come at us with one language wearing the pelt of another, and in the affray that follows it is hard to tell whether dead or living mouth carries the fiercer bite. Blood-boltered, thrawn and unco, her work is a Samhain of unexorcised historical memory, ventriloquised with the ‘cognition of bone’. Here the blasted landscapes of the pre-forgotten present give way to the richer patternings of the tree alphabet, all under the sovereignty of our highland Orpheus, the executed Mary Queen of Scots. Not since Sorley MacLean hymned the woods of Raasay have the ghosts of the Gaelic past bestrode the present more imperiously.' – David Wheatley, on The Gaelic Garden of the Dead
‘The subtitle “An Astonishment of Fire” says all you need to know about MacGillivray’s book: this is explosive work. Ravage presents the life and work of invented Norwegian-Shetlandic poet Kristján Norge, who “vanished” from the Outer Hebrides in 1961. MacGillivray invites us to live and breathe Norge’s last days, demons and all.’ – Chris McCabe, Librarian, National Poetry Library, in The Bookseller (Autumn 2023 Highlights)
‘A toweringly original - multi-genre, documentary, polyphonic, heteroglossic - tour-de-force from MacGillivray, reminiscent of her The Last Wolf of Scotland in its unique and restless form and visionary imagination. No one else is writing like this. No one has ever written like this. Except maybe Kristjan Norge.’ – Steve Ely, Broken Sleep Books (Books of the Year 2023)
'Ravage meditates on a lost poet’s work. I sense that a grail of Norge’s complex creativity was gathered by Moncreiff; MacGillivray in turn carries it in this extraordinary vessel, as his co-choisiche (spirit co-walker) … Perhaps our place, in turn, is to allow ourselves astonishment. The forensic re-readings will follow, as questions rise from the saline ash.' – Beth McDonough, DURA (Dundee University Review of the Arts)
‘Combining the arcane scholarship of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1948) and the gothic horror of The Wicker Man (1973), MacGillivray’s Ravage speaks to us from an eerie and evanescent past [...] Brittly beautiful poems of “lucent pharography” perform insistent incantations, working the permutations of a metaphysical vocabulary of fire, ice, bone and ash […] A floridly compelling fantasia, [Ravage] opens an audacious portal into rarely glimpsed realms…’ – David Wheatley, The Times Literary Supplement
