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Welcome
This is the second issue of Best Scottish Poems, an
online selection of twenty of the best poems by Scottish authors to appear
in books, pamphlets and literary magazines during 2004-2005.
We were delighted by the response to Hamish Whyte's selection, published
on St Andrew's Day 2004 and still accessible on this site. Bookshops and
libraries – with honourable exceptions – often provide a very
narrow range of poetry in general, and Scottish poetry in particular.
Best Scottish Poems offers readers in Scotland and beyond a way of sampling
poets' range and achievement, their language, their forms, their concerns.
It's in no sense a competition, but a personal choice, this year by the
poet and publisher Richard Price. The editor changes each year: Janice
Galloway has signed up for 2006.
The Scottish Poetry Library is grateful to the Scottish Arts Council
for funding this initiative through the National Lottery, and to printmaker
Ian Scott for kindly allowing us to use his beautiful image on the 'cover'.
Many thanks also to Julie Johnstone and Mary Hutchison for their work
in preparing the material and designing the pages.
We hope that you enjoy this varied selection, along with the poets' own
comments, and that it will encourage you to browse further, as well as
borrow and buy from the Scottish Poetry Library.
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Editor's Introduction
My approach to choosing the twenty Best Scottish
Poems 2005 has been this: to survey the output from Scottish magazines
and presses using information provided by the Scottish Poetry Library
and from my own reading over the year; to look a little at the publications
of Scottish poets further afield; to make the selection a brief anthology
of contemporary Scottish poetry based on a cross-section of different
aesthetic approaches rather than on the basis of particular issues and
identity-politics. Of course, aesthetics and subject matter aren't completely
separable, to say the least, but I have tried to make the selection varied
in form.
Outwith Scotland commentators might think that publication within a British
context is comparatively healthy for Scottish poets: Bloodaxe, Picador,
Faber and Carcanet each have significant Scottish poets on their lists.
But there is a dearth of poetry book publication in Scotland itself and
though the small press and the internet, and the welcome distribution
of English-made books within Scotland (and, of course, the Scottish Poetry
Library itself) certainly answer to part of the need, the small number
of medium-sized publishers in Scotland may suggest an infrastructure problem.
Most seriously, several of the poets here, some with several or even many
full-length collections published in the past, lack current book publication
at all.
I have the usual doubts of any editor as to whether there can be a Best
this or that in any category of art. So this is clearly a personal choice.
I declare an interest in that I am the editor of the little magazine,
Painted, spoken: I have in just a few cases chosen poems which
I thought at the time were excellent and which I select again here.
I have enjoyed reading so many companionable poems in the process of making
the selection. The reasonable, genial, tolerant voice is a bedrock of
current Scottish poetry, a kindly, rightly-compromising if mildly didactic
voice which is shared in fact across all the Anglophone languages in Britain.
It would be foolish to jettison it altogether or even to marginalise it.
I have taken an eclectic view, though, and have especially been on the
look out for poems that fall into the following categories: the creation
of new forms (experimental, avant-garde, innovative, call it what you
will); the renewal and command of a spectrum of older ones; sharp political
verse, acidic if need be (the invasion of Iraq did, however, produce many
political poems – it remains to be seen if it has politicised people
and poetry in general); those that display information that the reader
is not likely at first to recognise, either because the information is
about topics rarely covered, or, especially, because its mode of presentation
is novel; poetry which is much more self-conscious about its sound, from
broad structures of rhythm to syllabic nuance; poetry which is deeply
pleasurable in its sensuous and visual vocabulary, without a moral epilogue
or a facile vocab list; and poetry which is as-if-in-the-experience rather
than as-if-outside-the-experience.
Subject-wise I have been struck by the many references to the seasons
in the poems I've chosen; perhaps a heightened awareness of what may well
be catastrophic climate change is part of this. There have also been very
touching, tender lyrics – short, not-so-simple, beautiful poems,
that I have not hesitated to include. While the poets here observe domestic
and intimate relations on the one hand, and the changes in the planet
on the other, they also meet the challenge (here or in their other poetry)
to engage in and with the vast space between: the civic and political
space that poetry can also address with power.
My choice is intended to be a short cut to the range of possibility and
excellence that is available. I hope these poems are as inspiring to new
readers as they have been to me.
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