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Scotlands: Poets and the Nation

Edited by Douglas Gifford and Alan Riach

Cover Picture of Scotlands: Poets and the Nation
Categories: Anthologies, Scottish
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (264 pages)
(Pub. Sep 2004)
9781857547405
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Editors
  • If poets were the unacknowledged keepers of a nation's soul, then an anthology of two thousand years of Scottish poets' responses to their country should offer illuminating insights into changing perspectives on Scotland throughout history. What did poets, among the most sensitive of Scottish commentators, prize or decry in their country? How did they value its landscape, its institutions, its ordinary and extraordinary people? This anthology considers a wide range of poems from the earliest times to the present day which either use 'Scotland' as their title or focus centrally on the issue of nation and place, intriguingly illustrating how ideas of Scotland as a nation and a place of belonging have changed significantly over more than a thousand years. From the Gaelic poets to Dunbar and Henryson, and from Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns through the neglected nineteenth century to the Scottish Renaissance of MacDiarmid and modern poets including Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith, Liz Lochhead, and Douglas Dunn, this collection offers an astonishing variety of ways of responding to the idea of nationhood.
    Douglas Gifford
    Douglas Gifford holds the Chair of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University and is the author of numerous books and critical studies of Walter Scott, Neil Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, James Hogg and modern Scottish fiction. He is also senior editor of Scottish Literature at Edinburgh University Press, and co-convener of the ... read more
    Alan Riach
    Alan Riach is a poet, teacher and critic, and the general editor of Carcanet’s Collected Works of Hugh MacDiarmid . ... read more
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