Skaldance weaves in and out of Orkney history the way wind, ocean, and invaders have shaped that unique Norse-Scottish landscape and culture. With wry, quiet humour or bold drama, Gary Geddes establishes connections with a people and a land where his forebears fished long ago.

An outsider with a stake in these remote northern islands, Geddes takes on the role of skald, the poet of Old Norse tradition, who reports on love, politics, and the past. He creates a polyphony of voices, some ironically detached, others passionately engaged. They tell of hardship and desire in comic vignettes, heartbreaking lyrics, or sagas of survival. Whether lighthearted or tragic, the poems in Skaldance are intelligent, witty, exquisitely crafted, and supple in their expression.

Gary Geddes was born in Vancouver and raised mostly on the west coast, where he gill netted, loaded boxcars at BC Sugar Refinery, stocked shelves at Woodwards, worked as a fishing guide at Whytecliffe, taught on Texada Island, and drove a water-taxi. After doing graduate studies at Reading University in England and at the University of Toronto, he embarked on a varied career as a writer, teacher, editor, and publisher. Gary taught for twenty years at Concordia University in Montreal before returning to the west coast, where he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture at Western Washington University (1998-2001) and served as writer-in-residence at Green College, and the Vancouver Public Library. He has written and edited more than thirty-five books of poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, criticism, translation and anthologies, including 20th Century Poetry & Poetics and 15 Canadian Poets x 3. His literary awards include the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize, the National Poetry Prize, the Americas Best Book Award in the 1985 Commonwealth Poetry Competition, National Magazine Gold Award, the Writers Choice Award, Archibald Lampman Prize, the Poetry Book Society Recommendation and the Gabriela Mistral Prize, which he shared with Nobel laureates Octavio Paz and Vaclav Havel and with Rafael Alberti, Ernesto Cardenal, and Mario Benedetti. Gary Geddes lives on Vancouver Island, where he divides his time between Victoria and French Beach.