As part of the StAnza Festival, 'Scotland' by Hugh MacDiarmid is now a poetry installation at the bus station in St Andrews. To see an enlarged version, click the image. 'Scotland' is taken from MacDiarmid's Complete Poems: Volume I, which is published by Carcanet.

The Stanza website explains: 'As part of the Year of Creative Scotland and the nomination of St Andrews for a Creative Place Award, for 2012 StAnza is taking poetry out and about to where people are on the move, providing poetic brief encounters to people as they travel through this creative corner of Fife. Look out for verse at the town’s local railway station at Leuchars, a few miles outside town, and at the bus station in the town centre.'


Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) was born in 1892 at Langholm in the Scottish Borders. After training as a teacher, he worked as a journalist, before serving in France and Greece during the First World War. Returning to Scotland, he worked as a journalist, and in 1922 began to publish poems in Scots. From that point he became a key figure in the Scottish Renaissance. He became a founder-member of the Scottish National Party in 1928, and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1934. He was expelled from both during the 1930s, although he rejoined the Communist Party in 1956. Between 1933 and 1942 he lived with his second wife in the Shetlands. In 1951 he settled with his family at Brownsbank, near Biggar, where he lived until his death in 1978.

Photo © Sasha de Buyl-Pisco