Best Scottish Poems 2019
I think it’s fair to say that we’ve never had to publish and launch an edition of Best Scottish Poems under quite these circumstances before. When we turned our mind to producing Best Scottish Poems 2019 last year, the Library was open, handshakes were nothing out of the ordinary, and if we spoke of masks it would be more readily in the context of Yeatsian role-playing or ancient Greek theatre.
As Pablo Neruda said, ‘You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep the spring from coming’, and so we present for your pleasure the latest iteration of Best Scottish Poems, zestily chosen and introduced by our editor the poet and musician Roseanne Watt. I enjoyed Rosanne’s company and her reading in support of indigenous languages at the Transpoesie Festival in Brussels last October. Had she not donned the mantle of editor, Watt herself could have expected to have featured in this edition, having published in 2019 her praised debut, the Saltire Poetry Prize-nominated Moder Dy (Birlinn).
Perhaps it’s just the times we’re living through that makes me think so, but, reading once more through Watt’s choices, it really does seem to me that these poems are in conversation with each other. Look at the way that Niall Campbell’s ‘The Night Watch’, a nocturnal snapshot of parental anxiety, connects with Janette Ayachi’s take on becoming a parent ‘New Mother’. The narrator of Rachel Plummer’s ‘Selkie’ slips boundaries which weigh down the voice speaking Tom Stewart’s ‘Real Boy’. Lucy Burnett’s ‘The Brexfast After’ takes us back to a time when all anyone ever spoke about was leaving the European Union, while Hannah Lavery’s ‘Scotland, You’re No Mine’ is a reminder; if you were one of those people who in the wake of the 2016 EU referendum argued Scotland is less consumed with the xenophobic impulses behind Brexit, that Scotland has its own unresolved problems with race and identity.