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Selected Poetry

Hugh MacDiarmid

Edited by Alan Riach and Michael Grieve

Cover Picture of Selected Poems
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Categories: 20th Century, Scottish
Imprint: Fyfield Books
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (320 pages)
(Pub. May 2004)
9781857547566
£14.95 £13.45
  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892-1978), one of the major poets of the twentieth century, is the greatest Scottish poet of any century. He drew on the literary and vernacular traditions of Scottish culture, revitalising the Scots language to create a literature that is modern, engaged and experimental, both nationalist and international in its range.

    This selection explores the diversity of MacDiarmid's work, from delicate lyrics derived from the Scots ballad tradition to fierce polemic. It includes the whole of his greatest work, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), and his philosophical poem 'On a Raised Beach', with a full glossary of its technical terms. Scots words have been glossed at the foot of each page, and the collection includes an illuminating memoir by Hugh MacDiarmid's son, Michael Grieve.
    Hugh MacDiarmid
    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 ... 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
    Michael Grieve
    MICHAEL GRIEVE, the son of Christopher Murray Grieve, was a journalist and editor on newspapers and a television producer and editor. He was Vice-Chairman of the Scottish National Party. Michael Grieve died in 1995. ... read more
    'Riach has done Scottish literature a great service in masterminding the Carcanet edition of the works of Hugh MacDiarmid...'
    Times Literary Supplement
    Praise for Hugh MacDiarmid 'Watch him, an angel's set his tongue on fire.'
    Norman MacCaig
    'Lord God, this fellow is a poet, singing a song even when pain seizes him, or the woe of the world murmurs in his heart'
    Sean O'Casey
    'Every door in any town should be wide open to that great lyric poet Hugh MacDiarmid.'
    Dylan Thomas
    'These great people like MacDiarmid are a bit scary, '
    Liz Lochhead
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