Dermot Bolger on a wise and wonderful book by Andrew Greig (above) that takes us on a journey to the heart of golf and to a poet's soul

It is not uncommon for a middle-aged man recovering from a life-threatening illness to suddenly find God again, it is more rare that he finds golf instead. But, as the acclaimed Scottish poet and novelist Andrew Greig reveals in his new book Preferred Lies: A Journey to the Heart of Scottish Golf, golf can be almost as spiritual an experience.

When I spoke to Greig from his home on Orkney he agreed that a passion for golf is rare among poets. Quoting Yeats' lines "So great a sweetness flows/I shake from head to foot", Greig wondered if Yeats had been a secret golfer too, as it seemed the perfect description of a man watching a long putt sweep across a green, swerve and suddenly clatter into the hole.

I had to inform him, however, the Nobel laureate's flirtation with golf was extremely brief and unrewarding. Taken out on to Dublin courses, by order of his wife who felt he needed more exercise, Yeats' swipes at his golf ball generally caused it to fly off into the rough, unfindable. Looking for his ball was not a concept the great man ever understood, so he would simply gaze into space until someone placed another at his feet. Yeats' etiquette, if not his golf, improved with time, in that, learning that golf balls cost two and six, he would drop a half-crown on the ground after each wild shot before moving on.

If the soul of golf was lost on Yeats - the rare exhilarating moment when you watch a perfect shot soar through the air - it has very much been rekindled for Greig, who - following a serious illness - set out on an 18-course odyssey across Scotland.

The result is a wonderful and wise book, quite unlike any golfing book you will have read before. Although he plays the old course at St Andrews, in memory of his father, who once took him off school as a boy to play there as a rite of passage, Greig's heart of golf is a long way from the corporate packaging of the big Scottish courses.

He starts with golf's true roots, on courses like Laird on the small island of North Ronaldsay, with a population of 62 people and 3,000 sheep. Here the privately-owned golf-course is open to all, with the clubhouse a battered shed on breeze blocks and the greens, fairways and rough merged into one indistinguishable strip of undulating links.

On the seventh hole, he has to lift and drop when his ball lands in the ribcage of a rabbit skeleton and he has to clear away pebbles, bones and sheep droppings before putting on each "green".

It is a long way from the manicured American-style fairways and bunkers at the exclusive Dukes course outside St Andrews, but, as Greig argues persuasively, "if you minded to encounter the source and origin of golf, don't go to St Andrews, Carnoustie or farcically exclusive Muirfield . . . use the money to fly to Orkney, then from Kirkwell to North Ronaldsay with four clubs, a putter and a few balls; stay at the Bird Observatory, then play as many rounds as you feel like. Play for nothing at all but the playing of it and you'll be playing true golf, the original game, drinking from the clear source".

The heavy hickory-shafted putter Greig used for most of his odyssey belonged to his late father, and in taking up golf again after an off-and-on hiatus of 35 years, Greig agrees he was not just journeying through Scotland but journeying back through his past. In an age of confessional autobiographies - where people increasingly need to tell us far more about themselves than we ever needed to know - Scottish writers seem adept at finding vehicles to subtly carry the bones of their life stories, while seemingly being about something else.

To say that Greig's father strides like a colossus through this book would be an over-statement, mainly because Greig's father, a modest, honest club golfer would be uncomfortable with such hyperbole. But this book contains the lessons about life passed on from father to son via golf.

Hearing Greig describe his father, I was reminded of the various true gentleman in their later years I have felt privileged to play golf with in Donabate Golf Club. We all know such people who quietly encapsulate the essence of the game. Greig remembers his father teeing up a Dunlop 65 found in the rough a month earlier as he played with two old friends: "Unhurried, absorbed yet not that bothered, they get around with the minimum of fuss. As always they play briskly, with few words and some brief chuckles".

The winner buys the drinks because "good fortune must come with a penalty and a bad day is best cheered with a free drink".

His father came to visit him and talk about golf when Greig drifted in and out of consciousness in intense care, balanced between life and death. The fact his father, and other visitors who helped him to cling on to life, were dead did not strike him as odd at the time. When night terrors seized him during his slow recovery, he held them at bay by playing his father's nine-hole course in his mind: "Though my memory of recent things was hopeless, I found I could visualise every hole methodically and feel again the worn club grips, smell cut grass . . . I'm fifteen. My parents are still alive, I have never been in love, I have never seriously lost. It's all in front of me. Achievements nil, aspirations infinite."

For Greig, the book became about: "my mother and father, adolescence and friendship, love and death, my country and a lot of dead people. And not being dead when I could so easily have been, know that I will soon be gone. And still we make love and play golf."

It is not about how to break 80 or 90 or even 100. It does not break down the components of a swing or suggest realignments in language best left for the manual of a Ford Fiesta. It is about the raw pleasure at the heart of golf where you are playing nobody but yourself; about the memory of the one perfect shot which sustains you. In the end it is about memory - Greig's memory of the perfect shot played with a driver from the rough by his brother a quarter-century ago, or the horrendous 10 shots it took his father to finish the 18th at Glenbervie and lose a medal competition by a single stroke.

As Greig says, "golf doesn't tell us what we'd like to be told, it remorselessly shows up our pettiness and failures of character. Our impatience, anxiety, childish grumpiness - they're all there". But it is a deeply honest game. Bringing him around St Andrews as a boy, Greig's father told him about Bobby Jones' baffled response when praised for calling a shot against himself that nobody else had seen. For Jones it was simple honesty and he needed no more praise for it that being praised for not robbing a bank.

If you have ever stood alone on a fairway, with life and death temporarily suspended, as you watched a ball seemingly hang forever in mid-air before dropping into a green, and had the sense of truly being alive, then this might be your perfect book. It will help you nurse your wounds as you forget all the other terrible shots. It will lure you back out to the challenge and anticipation of the first tee once again.

Preferred Lies: A Journey Through the Heart of Scottish Golf by Andrew Greig, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99.