Edinburgh Book Of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry

The most wide-ranging anthology of twentieth-century poetry in English and Scots available.

The last three decades have seen unprecedented flourishing of creativity across the Scottish literary landscape, so that contemporary Scottish poetry constitutes an internationally renowned, award-winning body of work. At the heart of this has been the work of poets. As this poetry makes space for its own innovative concerns, it renegotiates the poetic inheritance of preceding generations. At the same time, Scottish poetry continues to be animated by writing from other places. The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry is the definitive guide to this flourishing poetic scene. Its chapters examine Scottish poetry in all three of the nation's languages. It analyses many thematic preoccupations: tradition and innovation; revolutions in gender; the importance of place; the aesthetic politics of devolution. These chapters are complemented by extended close readings of the work of key poets that have defined this era, including Edwin Morgan, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson, Aonghas MacNeacail and John Burnside.

This volume considers the major themes, texts and authors of Scottish literature of the twentieth and, so far, twenty-first century. It identifies the contexts and impulses that led Scottish writers to adopt their creative literary strategies. Moving beyond traditional classifications, it draws on the most recent critical approaches to open up new perspectives on Scottish literature since 1900. The volume's innovative thematic structure ensures that the most important texts or authors are seen from different perspectives whether in the context of empire, renaissance, war and post-war, literary genre, generation, and resistance. In order to provide thorough coverage, these thematic chapters are complemented by chronological 'Arcade' chapters, which outline the contexts of the literature of the period by decades, and by 'Overview' chapters which trace developments across the century in theatre, language and Gaelic literature. Taken together, the chapters provide a thorough and thought-provoking account of the century's literature.

The History begins with the first full-scale critical consideration of Scotland's earliest literature, drawn from the diverse cultures and languages of its early peoples. The first volume covers the literature produced during the medieval and early modern period in Scotland, surveying the riches of Scottish work in Gaelic, Welsh, Old Norse, Old English and Old French, as well as in Latin and Scots. New scholarship is brought to bear, not only on imaginative literature, but also law, politics, theology and philosophy, all placed in the context of the evolution of Scotland's geography, history, languages and material cultures from our earliest times up to 1707.

In this series, a contemporary poet advocates a poet or poets of the past or present whom they have particularly admired. By their selection of verses and by the personal and critical reactions they express, the selectors offer intriguing insight into their own work.

The theme of volume 19 is 'Literary Devolution: Writing Now in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England', and includes poetry from Scotland, with essays by David Kinloch and Christopher Whyte on Socttish Gaelic; and poetry from Wales with essays by Jerry Hunter and Sam Adams; from Ireland, three cantos of John Montague's new poem on David Jones, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's Gaelic poetry translated by Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuickan, and a new play by Vincent Woods, acclaimed in performance and published here for the first time; and English poetry together with new fiction by Iain Sinclair. It also includes an interview with Nathaniel Tarn, editor of innovative Cape Goliard Editions. Translation from European poets into English and Scottish is a seminal feature of poetry in this period, represented here by translation from the Polish by Seamus Heaney, from Mayakovsky by Edwin Morgan, from Rimbaud and Mandelstam by Alistair Mackie; and Sylvia Plath's translations from the French reviewed by Alistair Elliot.