Aye Write! Best Scottish Poems Launch

Annually the Scottish Poetry Library releases an online publication entitled Best Scottish Poems. Now in its ninth year, Best Scottish Poems 2012 offers a snapshot of the past twelve months through the best poetry published in Scotland. Each year different selection committees are chosen and for the 2012 edition authors Zoe Strachan and Louise Welsh had the task of wading through thousands of poems in journals, periodicals, pamphlets and collections in order to collate what they agreed were the best twenty.

At the Aye Write! launch event Strachan described how they strived to create a diverse collection by not including poems with repeating themes and forms. She stated the Scottish landscape continues to inspire poets, often resulting in similar outputs, and that the rural poems which made the cut had to do something more than create a snapshot of something beautiful. The poetry in the collection is a mix of contemporary and classical, urban and rural, established poets and newer voices. However, Strachan noted that whilst the entries were balanced in terms of gender there appeared a distinct lack of ethnic diversity in the poems published in Scotland.

The variety of writing in the collection was demonstrated when the poets read their submissions - Lorna Callery’s Pigeon with Warburtons displays a painter's quality of image in a tense urban setting. Maggie Rabatski uses haunting images of milk curdling to depict the distress of a cow robbed of its newborn in the mournful Sacrifice/Iobairt. And Willaim Letford’s Wit is Is, set on a building site amongst the workies, skilfully manages to be funny whilst asking deep metaphysical questions.

All the poems in the collection can be viewed on the Scottish Poetry Library website along with comments from both the poets themselves, and editors Strachan and Welsh. [Rowena McIntosh]