Scottish Poems [Hardcover]

In time for Burns Night (the annual celebration of Scottish culture that takes place on January 25, the birthday of Robert Burns)—a sweeping literary tour of Scotland from the Middle Ages to the present, the only single-volume collection of Scottish poetry currently available.

Scottish poetry has a long and distinguished history in three languages—English, Scots, and Gaelic—and all are well represented here. The most renowned and beloved poets—Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Muriel Spark among them—mingle with their lesser-known but equally distinctive compatriots, including many of those who have emerged from the recent Scottish poetry renaissance. The poems are organized by theme: from matters of the heart to subjects spiritual and philosophical to the poetry of place. All of the verse is marked by a characteristic energy, wit, satire, and passionate lyrical intensity, and all demonstrates the power of art that proudly emanates from, but is never limited by, the place of its birth.Gerard Carruthersis the editor of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets anthologyRobert Burns.PREFACE

Scotland, like so many other nations, has produced poetry that is patriotic, that paints landscapes, people and situations, that speaks to personal matters, and those equally everyday matters pertaining to the mind and to the spirit. The Christian heritage of Scotland has long been played out in verse, through Celtic devotional works, Catholicworks, Protestantworks, and not forgetting satires on the Puritanism in Scotland's post-Reformation identity. Language and culture have been equally multifarious in the nation so that three major languages: Scots, English and Gaelic (examples of which are translated in this anthology) compete and co-exist in poetry. The fifteenth-century poet, William Dunbar, joked that there was no music in hell except for the bagpipes, and there speaks somethl“W