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10 of Scotland’s greatest poets
BURNS night has been and gone, but poetry is for every night, and day. It’s a source of solace, comfort and cheer in difficult times like the current pandemic and lockdown. So here, to help you through, is the first ten of our list of 20 of Scotland’s greatest poets – the rest, the poets of the earlier years, will be published tomorrow.
WS GRAHAM (1918-1986)
John Burnside described WS Graham as, “one of the finest of British poets working in the last century ... an artist who raises questions that are as urgent now as they were in his own time.” Born in Greenock, father an engineer, mother a shopkeeper, he spent most of his adult in West Penwith, Cornwall, amongst the artists of the St Ives school. He appears to set out his approach to writing and life in his elegy for the painter, Peter Lanyan, The Thermal Stair – and it’s brutal. “The poet or painter steers his life to maim / Himself somehow for the job/ His job is Love.”
Quotable lines: “I leave this at your ear for when you wake,/ A creature in its abstract cage asleep./ Your dreams blindfold you by the light they make.” (I Leave This At Your Ear)
EDWIN MORGAN (1920-2010) Scotland’s first Makar created poetry of extraordinary honesty and playfulness. Who could not enjoy, for instance, the way his Loch Ness Monster, sinks to the depths with a “Gombl mbl bl –/ blm plm,/ blm plm,/ blm plm,/ blp.” Most remarkable, though, is the way he wrote about love. Though Morgan didn’t come out as gay until he was 70, his sexuality was evident in his earlier poems. In The New Divan, his great mystic war poem, he relates fragmented memories from his Second World War desert campaign – in which he, a conscientious objector had a non-combatant role in the Royal Army Medical Corps. “Not in King’s Regulations, to be in love,” he writes, acknowledging that love like his is forbidden.
Quotable lines: “There were never strawberries/ like the ones we had/ that sultry afternoon/ sitting on the step/ of the open french window/ facing each other/ your knees held in mine.” (Strawberries)
ALASTAIR REID (1926-2014) Peripatetic Alastair Reid, the son of a
Whithorn church minister, who roamed the globe, never too long in any one place, created poems of extraordinary calm and poise. They are, as Eric Ormsby once put it in the Times Literary Supplement, “at once modest and monumental”, like “homes hammered out of words”. Famously, in the 1950s, he went on holiday to Mallorca and happened to meet Robert Graves – and started a remarkable friendship which ended when he ran off with Margot Callas, Graves’ muse.
Among his most glorious poems is, Scotland, in which the poet, delighted by the sunshine, goes out and declares his joy to a woman – who is having none of it.
Quotable lines: “What a day it is!’ cried I, like a sunstruck madman.” Her reply spoken, with ancient misery, is, ‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!” (Scotland)
LIZ LOCHHEAD (BORN 1947)
The much-loved poet and playwright brought her trademark wit, feminism and humanity to the role of Scotland’s Makar, between 2011 and 2016. Carol
Ann Duffy described her writing as a “warm broth of quirky rhythms, streetwise speech patterns, showbiz pizzazz, tender lyricism and Scots”. Lochhead grew up in a council house in the mining village of Newarthill, and wrote her first poem, The Visit, while at Glasgow School of Art in 1965. Notable works include Favourite Place, an evocation of trips made north, Hell For Poets and View Of Scotland/Love Poem.
Quotable lines: “Down on her hands and knees/ at ten at night on Hogmanay,/ my mother still giving it elbowgrease / jiffywaxing the vinolay. (This is too / ordinary to be nostalgia.) On the kitchen table / a newly opened tin of sockeye salmon.”
(View Of Scotland/Love Poem)
IMTIAZ DHARKER (BORN 1954) Born in Pakistan and brought up in
Scotland, Dharker’s poems are rich and evocative, touching on geographical and cultural displacement, conflict and gender politics. Speech Balloon charts the spread of a phrase from one culture to another. Blessing describes a slum neighbourhood in Mumbai where a mains water pipe bursts, highlighting the preciousness of water in a hot climate. “The skin cracks like a pod,” she writes. “There never is enough water.”
Quotable lines: “You must have noticed, it’s really quite clear,/ this condition has spread, it’s happening there,/ it’s happening here. It’s full-blown, grown/ beyond every border, to the furthest corner/ of every country where English is spoken/or English is known.” (Speech Balloon)
ROBIN ROBERTSON (BORN 1955) If what you’re looking for is a really long poem that will take you right through the night and into the next day, then Robin Robertson’s recent epic, The Long Take, is the book for you. Set in the years immediately after
the Second World War and following a traumatised D-Day veteran from Nova Scotia, it has been described by John Banville as “a masterly work of art, exciting, colourful, fast-paced.” But Robertson does short beautifully too. Born in Scone, Perthshire, Robertson was brought up in Aberdeen where his father, a Church of Scotland minister, was the university chaplain. He is a great reteller and remaker of the old myths, whether from classical or Scottish mythology, in poems like the wonderful selkie tale, At Roane Head. Quotable lines: “Someone saw them once, outside, hirpling/ down to the shore, chittering like rats,/ and said they were fine swimmers,/ but I would have guessed at that.” (At Roane Head)
CAROL ANN DUFFY (BORN 1955) As Jeanette Winterson once put it, the range of Carol Ann Duffy’s imagination is vast. “She moves easily from gorilla-scale to the interiority of the sonnet.”
Duffy moved to Stafford, from Glasgow where she was born, when she was just five, but she is still included in many a list of Scottish poets. The Scottish Poetry Library claims the former UK poet laureate, so why shouldn’t we? “Poetry, above all,” wrote Duffy, “is a series of intense moments – its power is not in narrative. I’m not dealing with facts, I’m dealing with emotion.” That heightened feeling is there throughout her poems – whether in her exploration of female archetypes, The World’s Wife or in her TS Eliot prize-winning collection of love poems, The Rapture, in which her poem Syntax declares, “Love’s language starts, stops, starts; the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.” Quotable lines: “I’m not the first or the last/ to stand on a hillock,/ watching the man she married/ prove to the world/ he’s a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock.” (Mrs Icarus)
JACKIE KAY (BORN 1961) Scotland’s current Makar, a writer of poems that reach out to us all, romantic, tender, generous and funny, has been a voice to guide and comfort us through this pandemic year. Often her poems tell parts of her own life story. The Adoption Papers, her first collection, told of her own adoption, child of a nurse and a Nigerian student studying in Aberdeen, by a white Scottish, communist couple. Fiere is a lyric counterpart to Red Dust Road, her prose memoir, which tells of her search to find her birth father. Kay’s is a much-needed voice, particularly in these times of Black Lives Matter, holding up a mirror to Scotland’s current and past identities.
Quotable lines: “I was born in the city of crag and stone./ I am not a daughter to one father./ I am not a sister to one brother./ I am light and dark./ I am father and mother.” (Between The Dee And The Don)
KATHLEEN JAMIE (BORN 1962)
In 2004, when Jamie won the Forward prize for The Tree House, chair of the judges, Lavinia Greenlaw, described it as a collection which enlarged “the scope and capacity of poetry being written today”.
Her works are about landscape and nature, but also so much more – the connections between all things, the charm of the ordinary detail.
In them we find bluebells nodding to all questions, bats, “testing their idea for a new form which unfolded and cohered before our eyes” a hawk, gliding low, “her own dark shape in her talons like a kill”.
Quotable lines: “And though I’m poisoned/ choking on the small change/ of human hope/ daily beaten into me/ look: I am still alive—/ in fact, in bud.” (The Wishing Tree)
DON PATERSON (BORN 1963) When Don Paterson’s Landing Light came out in 2003, to huge acclaim and prizes, there was no doubt that he was a significant poet.
“These poems,” wrote Helen Dunmore, “shine a light into crevices of feeling that amaze the poet as much as they move the reader.”
Born in Dundee in 1963, he left school to pursue a career in music, and published his first book, Nil Nil – whose titular poem followed the tragicomic story of a fictional Scottish football side – in 1993.
His poetry feels of the world we live in, accessible, covering family, friendships, everyday wonder and the marvel of just being alive.
Quotable lines: “Jamie made his landing in the world/ so hard he ploughed straight back into the earth./ They caught him by the thread of his one breath/ and pulled him up.” (The Thread)