SANDY Moffat’s famous painting Poets’ Pub (1981), now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, gathers a relatively small number of major poets in a landmark collective. They set an example. Nearly three decades later, Scottish poets still repay rereading. The more you read great literature, the better it becomes. Pre-eminent poets of the 1960s include Tom Buchan (1931-95) and Alan Jackson (b.1938), whose best books, respectively, Dolphins at Cochin and The Grim Wayfarer (both 1969), remain among the iconic livres de cachet of that time. Kenneth White (b.1936) also began in that era with The Cold Wind of Dawn (1966). In his longer poems, in The Bird Path (1989), and shorter poems in Handbook for the Diamond Country (1990), and in many subsequent collections of poems and essays, White’s idea of “geopoetics” brings together landscape, geology and intellectual nomadism.
The relation between territory and cultural articulation was more locally and visibly demonstrated by Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), whose poetry was most literally realised in the residential garden of Little Sparta at Stonypath, his home in the Lanarkshire hills, which remains to be visited and explored every summer.
READ MORE: Why Jackie Kay is one of the most vibrant poets today
The poetry-reading scene, since the Heretics group of the 1970s, includes festivals and regular events all over Scotland, such as St Mungo’s Mirrorball in Glasgow, run by Jim Carruth – who was appointed poet laureate of Glasgow in 2014 – as well as The Herald’s “Poem of the Day” curated by and sometimes featuring the poetry of Lesley Duncan. Many individuals have their own growing oeuvres: Ron Butlin (b.1949), Edinburgh Makar, 2008-14; John Purser (b.1942), writing with incomparable immediacy of life as a crofter on Skye, and out of extensive knowledge of Scotland’s composers and music; and John Burnside (b.1955) who began with The Hoop (1988) and has published memorable collections including Common Knowledge (1991) and Black Cat Bone (2011).
WN Herbert (b.1961) begins his poem Dingle Dell with the line: “There is no passport to this country, / it exists as a quality of the language.” The singularity of that last word belies its indicating of not one but a plurality of languages, voices, and forms of articulation. Born in Dundee, Herbert went to Oxford University and published his research on Hugh MacDiarmid and a number of poetry collections which uniquely balance and exhilaratingly lift and tumble through a range of themes and ideas: Forked Tongue (1994), Cabaret McGonagall (1996), The Laurelude (1998) and Bad Shaman Blues (2006) engage questions of language (Dundonian, English, Scots, other vocal forms), political preference, obscure or forgotten films, historical characters, writers, objects, places and moments with unpredictable enthusiasm and unstoppable effervescence.
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Herbert, Richard Price (b.1966), Alan Riach (b.1957), Peter McCarey (b.1956), David Kinloch (b.1959) and Robert Crawford (b.1959) were loosely grouped as “The Informationists” in the anthology Contraflow on the Superhighway (1994), co-edited by Herbert and Price. Yet they are highly individuated, with Price’s inimitable evocation of domesticity and parenthood, Crawford’s deliberate address to a range of subjects in science, politics and biography, and Kinloch’s explorations of the ekphrastic relations between visual art and poetic meaning.
In the 1990s, online technology changed people’s lives generally, and particularly for poets, yet the conditions of Scotland’s history, geography and politics have their own impositions, through and beyond new technologies.
Every poet publishing in the first decade of the 21st century shows them at work. The early poems of Peter McCarey (b.1956) are in Collected Contraptions (2011). His vast project The Syllabary (online at thesyllabary.com) has generated an epic for the age of information technology. Richard Price noted that the poetry of the contemporaries of the original group of “Informationists”, including Iain Bamforth (b.1959) and Alison Kermack or Alison Flett (b.1965), shared similar concerns and priorities, though their association was and remains unconstrained by definition.
In a broad sense, in one way or another, each of them prioritises matters of language, education, social engagement and self-conscious relations between the world of the wilderness, creatural nature, and the politics of social civilisation. They are, but are not only, lyric poets, but also poets self-consciously working in a world of pervasive quantities of “information” – much of which, they imply, is a decoy. “Fake news” is what all poetry deconstructs by its very nature.
Carol Ann Duffy has used poetry to explore the theme of linguistic dislocation
For Carol Ann Duffy (b.1955), appointed British Poet Laureate in 2009, otherness is a constant presence. Born in Scotland, she moved to England as a child, recollecting not only places and people from childhood but much more intimately a language, idiom and music foreign to the environment which her mature choices and adulthood grew into.
Duffy and others have written poems specifically on the theme of linguistic dislocation. The women, who published increasingly from the 1970s, made use of the achievements of their predecessors in the development of their own distinctive work. Meg Bateman learned from, respected, honoured and made creative use of the example of MacLean, as Liz Lochhead made of Morgan, or any younger poet made of that generation of men in Moffat’s Poets’ Pub, much as those men did of MacDiarmid. But none of them emulated anyone.
The sustained strength of character of Liz Lochhead, the clever turns and challenges of Duffy, the self-assurance and poise of Jackie Kay, the balance of self-centredness and vulnerability of Meg Bateman, the personal, historical and universal themes of Janet Paisley, the gingery decisions and tentative annotations of experience of Kathleen Jamie, constitute a range of new poetic voices, techniques and approaches to experience. One of the most accomplished poets of this generation, Elizabeth Burns (1957-2015), from her first collection Ophelia (1991), and most effectively in Held (2010), quietly but with immense assurance, established an inimitable tone.
Janet Paisley, part of Scotland's diverse poetry community
Plurality is evident in the range of poets working in the early 21st century. Thomas A Clark, emphasising the values of taking your time and walking in landscapes experienced not as possessions but visceral daily experiences. Robert Allan Jamieson, Christine de Luca and Jen Hadfield drawing different strengths from their favoured place, the Shetland archipelago. Ian Stephen in relation to Lewis and the wild places around it. Angus Peter Campbell and Rody Gorman, carrying forward Gaelic priorities.
Don Paterson, turning domesticity into zircon-hard realisations of tenderness and relativity. Gerda Stevenson, also prioritising domesticity but equally in a fully politicised world, most forcefully in her 2018 collection Quines. Graham Fulton, bristlingly satiric in social contexts, often Paisley-based. Rab Wilson, serious or flamboyant in Ayrshire Scots. George Gunn, the laureate of Caithness.
Multiple prize-winning Andrew Jackson; Gerrie Fellows, exploring senses of displacement and belonging from her own experience, both as a New Zealander adopting Scotland and as a mother writing about in vitro fertilisation and the virtues of family, art and medicine. Robin Robertson, poet and publisher Roddy Lumsden. Mick Imlah (1956-2009), poet and editor, whose last book, The Lost Leader (2008), carried strength and poignancy in equal measure. Kathrine Sowerby, who, in these lines from Coastline Disturbance, might be writing for generations yet unborn: “We emerge after midnight filling the darkness with living. / Disappointments seem further across the ice”. These are only a sample of contemporary Scottish poets. There are many more. The Scottish Poetry Library archive is an essential resource, easily accessible online, with examples of poems from a growing number of writers from all over the country.
If MacDiarmid proposed a multi-faceted national identity, and the “seven poets” generation, rising after the Second World War, created their work from the geographical territories each one distinctively favoured, then the gendered, class-conscious, linguistically politicised world of the following generations has made our national identity an even more complex home to different diversities, accommodating – not always easily – nature and domesticity, chaos and order, cynicism and wonder, states and movements, selves and others, internationality and self-determined nationality.
Kathleen Jamie's work underlines the emotive power of poetry
And just as MacDiarmid evokes a constant process of change and unending renewal, a redisposition of things in a world that takes the risks of regeneration, so Kathleen Jamie (b.1962) keeps us in mind of what that means. Crossing the Loch from Jizzen (1999) begins with a quiet, conversational question, asking the reader if she or he might remember “how we rowed toward the cottage” across a bay, after a night drinking in a pub. The poet says she cannot remember who rowed, only how the jokes and voices went quiet and the sound of the oars in the water “reached long into the night”. The crossing is scary, the breeze is cold, the hills “hunched” around the loch and the water itself seems to conceal nuclear submarines, nightmares lurking below, real and metaphorical.
Yet the water is phosphorescent and beautiful, shining on fingers and oars, and the passengers are like pilgrim saints making a crossing to another place, a destination from which they will enter their futures, recollecting:
the glimmering anklets
we wore in the shallows
as we shipped oars and jumped,
to draw the boat safe, high at the
cottage shore.
The boat may be safe, the travellers ashore, but the wild is still there, and the autonomous region is always in need of new creation. This is what poetry does.
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