WHEN Donny O’Rourke edited the first edition of the anthology Dream State: The New Scottish Poets (1994; second edition 2002), the presiding spirits of older generations were still around to inform the book. Indeed, Edwin Morgan and Iain Crichton Smith were still writing when the first edition appeared. Norman MacCaig was to renew his currency with a generous selection of hitherto uncollected poems when they appeared in his new collected edition, The Poems (2005). MacDiarmid, when his rediscovered poems from manuscript sources mainly in the National Library of Scotland were published in The Revolutionary Art of the Future (2003), a quarter of a century after his death, caused front-page controversy. Differences between each poet were marked but continuities, affinities and connections were, and continue to be, active. Let’s begin here with poets working through and after the Second World War, and bring the list up to the 21st century.

Robert Garioch (1909-81) was an unassertive, shy-seeming Edinburgh man, very much in the tradition of Dunbar and Fergusson as a poet of the old city, the characters, encounters and events taking place in the capital. He went to school and university in Edinburgh, joined the army and went to North Africa during World War II, was captured and spent the years from 1942 to 1945 as a prisoner-of-war in Italy and Germany, later writing a memoir of this experience, Two Men and a Blanket (1975). He was a schoolteacher in Edinburgh, London and Kent before retiring in 1964 and working as an assistant on the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, describing himself as a “lexicographer’s orra body”.

His teaching career afforded him targets for some of his best satiric poems, such as Garioch’s Repone til George Buchanan and the Edinburgh Sonnet, Elegy, which begins, with reference to his elders in the profession,

They are lang deid, folk that I used to ken,

their firm-set lips aa mowdert and agley…

Those “firm-set lips” give the clue: self-righteousness, visible rectitude, stiff and solemn, now gone into the good Scots earth as depicted in the words that mean “rotted and out-of-shape”, that latter sense given in the word “agley” already evoking one of Burns’s proverbial phrases and “best-laid plans” going twisted and awry. With incomparably sly precision, Garioch undercuts these senior teachers’ self-importance. He describes them: one was “beld-heidit, wi a kyte” (bald, with a pot-belly) and another who “sneerit…and sniftert in his spite” and then comes the cutting judgement: “Weill, gin the arena deid, it’s time they were.” This gives some sense of Garioch’s ability to make use of words and phrases drawn from colloquial speech but also from literary sources, utilising tones and timbres that appear immediately accessible in poems that are structured with great literary sophistication (he is one of the finest modern authors of sonnets) and flawless ease of allusion.

Garioch was writer-in-residence at Edinburgh University and on Radio Forth, composing poems on events of the day, making use of tones and registers of speech that range widely from the most serious and self-deprecating, as in At Robert Fergusson’s Grave, to the most verbally reductive and hilarious, as in Heard in the Cougate, where a local Edinburgh resident is overheard stammering in disgust when disparaging the pompous flags and fountains in the Gardens, put up and turned on to mark the visit of the Queen and the King of Norway:

“Ah ddae-ken whu’ the pplace is comin tae

wi aw thae, hechyuch! fforeign potentates.”

His Complete Poetical Works (1983) collects a number of slim, small-press publications but amount to a most substantial achievement, both for the sharp perception and humour of the occasional poems, the seriousness and sober reasonableness of tragic enquiry into human destructiveness and waste in The Bog, The Wire and The Muir and for the impressive translations of the Roman poet Giuseppe Belli, whose sonnets of Rome Garioch felt might be transposed effectively to Edinburgh.

This is nowhere felt more movingly than in The Puir Faimly, the unsentimental, heartbreaking monologue of a helpless mother attempting to comfort her starving children. Garioch’s Edinburgh Sonnets are another masterly sequence and, like his translations of the Roman sonnets, are full elemental sympathy, urban grace and quiet, insinuating humour.

He is poet of masterly vernacular wit and compassion: poems such as Brother Worm, Perfect and Doctor Faust in Rose Street are effortlessly both local and universal. There is far more than the merely whimsical in his humour. A whole series of remarkable translations complements those he made from Belli. Garioch’s Scots language versions of poems by Pindar, Hesiod, the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, The Swan from the Carmina Burana, Goethe’s Prometheus, and A Fisher’s Apology from the Latin of Arthur Johnstone, Ferlie of the Weir and A Phantom of Haar from the French of Apollinaire, from the Gaelic sequence Dain do Eimhir of Sorley MacLean and above all, perhaps, The Humanist’s Trauchles in Paris from the Latin of George Buchanan, are astonishing achievements.

The collected poems of Norman MacCaig (1910-96) are an enormous thesaurus of similes and metaphors: a sheepdog rushes through a fence “like a piece of black wind”, a thorn bush is “an encyclopedia of angles” and a hen “stares at nothing with one eye, then picks it up”. Overtly descriptive of animals, reptiles, birds, creatures of the natural world, specific places in the north of Scotland around Lochinver and in Edinburgh, and particular people, his poems are also quizzical about the inadequacy, uncertainty, inefficiency, unreliability and limits of language itself, the borders of what language permits us to understand.

Writing exclusively in a clear, unaffected English, the tone is usually conversational and wry. He normally did not use capitals at the beginning of lines or even (after the first letter) in titles of poems. In “A man in my position”, MacCaig writes:

Hear my words carefully.

Some are spoken not by me, but

by a man in my position.

And in “Limits”, we are told that

our knowledge goes,

so far as we know, only

so far as we know

Yet the limits to our knowledge do not excuse us from certain understanding:

when molecules jump

from one figuration to another

they may not go hallelujahing into heaven

or howling into hell,

but

water becomes ice.

MacCaig began with two slim volumes in the 1940s which he later disowned, claiming that their avalanching language and obscurity were too much of their time, part of a quasi-surrealist movement in poetry called the “New Apocalypse” that had been prompted by Dylan Thomas, asserting the value of imagination over that of social realism. After a pause of a decade, MacCaig returned with Riding Lights (1955). While his poems up to the 1960s were usually metrical and regularly rhymed, and after the 1960s, normally in free verse, the absolute precision of his unmistakable tones of voice was maintained throughout his writing. All his poems, even when they seem slight, are the work of a mature intelligence.

He is characteristically ironic and, at times, wildly and wittily funny, yet both MacCaig and Garioch share a sense of the pathos of the epic effort. The predominant ethos of the Cold War, the existential anxieties of the era, have specific correlatives in MacCaig’s work, in his sensitivity to the provisional and sometimes duplicitous nature of language itself. Like other poets of his generation, he was an educationalist, a primary school teacher and, undemonstratively, an exponent of Scotland’s cultural and literary history.

He is also one of the funniest poets, with an extraordinarily dry, ironic humour and a shrewd sense of value. Consider how the precise observation and annotation of trivial things seen in Five Minutes At The Window delivers a profound message about people, and about what political idealism always neglects at its peril. We are invited to note that “a tree with lights for flowers” says “it’s Christmas” and a “seagull tries over and over again / to pick up something on the road” while “a white cat sits halfway up a tree.” Each observation invites the questions, “Why?” and “What are trivia?”

They’ve blown away my black mood.

I smile at the glass of freesias on the table.

My shelves of books say nothing

but I know what they mean.

He is suddenly “back in the world again/and happy” even though he acknowledges “its disasters, its horrors, its griefs.”

In the middle of the poem is a single line, “Oh, the motorcars.” No other poet could have written that line. It is imbued with a precise inflection, a sigh of recognition and a shaking of the head at the vanity of people spuriously rushing to unnecessary appointments, instead of simply pausing to take pleasure in the virtues and values of trivia in a world of fortunate and vulnerable peace. A master of tone, humour and irony, MacCaig is a great love poet of the natural world and a great elegist in the sequence, Poems For Angus.

These poets are high mountains in our recent history. Good people pay attention to them. Fools look away and wait for them to crumble.