"THE COUNTRY MURMURED OF him from sea to sea." Thus wrote a contemporary, recording the welcome given to Burns when his first volume of poems was published in 1786. "With his poems," wrote Robert Heron, "old and young, grave and gay, learned and ignorant, were alike transported." The title of the volume, famously, was Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect.
Now that title has been appropriated for an anthology of work by living Scottish poets, New Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect(Polygon, £9.99). It's a clever idea, though used before, even in Burns's lifetime, by rivals envious of his success
, and by others seeking either to emulate or to parody him. The new book is edited by Robert Crawford, Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews, and contains work by Crawford himself, and by John Burnside, Douglas Dunn, Alasdair Gray, WN Herbert, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, David Kinloch, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, Don Paterson and Robin Robertson.
The result is an entertaining demonstration of the variety of contemporary Scottish writing in verse form. Many of the contributors refer back to Burns himself, notably WN Herbert with his witty "Rabbie, Rabbie, Burning Bright", but several of the more interesting pieces take off in quite unexpected directions. Don Paterson gives us versions of Li Po and the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos, both translated into impeccable Lallans, while David Kinloch does something similar for the modern Italians Eugenio Montale and Pier Paolo Pasolini, though in this case it is more a matter of imitation than translation. Jackie Kay cocks a snook at MacDiarmid with her lines from "A Drunk Woman Looks at Her Nipple", while Liz Lochhead is even more outrageously amusing at the expense of Shakespeare, suggesting that his attitude to "Scotch verse" is "kinna like Mcgonigal's" in that he considers it "only guid enough for the Rude-Mechanicals". (She perhaps has her tongue in her cheek, or has she forgotten the Macbeths?)
What this compilation lacks, unsurprisingly, is any single piece approaching the naked sincerity that possessed Burns and so overwhelmed his readers from the start. The nearest thing here to that is perhaps Jackie Kay's "Wee Love Poem", with its truly vernacular conclusion:
A fishbone shape, a skeleton,
As if a' thing kid be
Paired doon to the wan essential,
So that ivery time I say,
I love ye tae biits,
You reply, I love ye to hale.
For the rest, New Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect can best be described in the words of its editor as "a sly wink to the master". That is to say, its merits are literary rather than exactly poetic. In this regard, Douglas Dunn's long English, a Scottish Essay, a rhymed rumination on the advantages and disadvantages of growing up "to speak two ways, and write/ In more than one, plural, and impolite", is without doubt the stand-out piece in the book.
A poet you won't find in the Crawford anthology is Hamish Whyte, which is, I think, a pity since at his best he comes nearer Burns's heart than the master's knee. His collection A Bird in the Hand (Shoestring Press, £8.95) contains a number of poems so pellucid that they don't call for explication. His subjects are, for the most part, homely: his father, his son taking photographs of shells, a woman reading the tea leaves, his wife, asleep, a couple seen behaving oddly on a railway train, a much-missed cat, that sort of thing. There's nothing portentous or pretentious about him. His poem "Otis", about that cat, is the best I've read on the subject since Hardy's. Thought is never replaced by rhetoric in these poems; the same goes for the work in Diana Hendry's Late Love & Other Whodunits (Peterloo Poets/Mariscat Press, £7.95), in which I was delighted to find a poem in memory of my old friend Philip Toynbee, as well as a number of moving love poems.
Someone once defined Diana Hendry's particular gift as an ability "to see the otherness of the very ordinary", and if you add that she has a sly sense of humour, that gets it about right. Here she is with a whole "Prayer at Sixty":
Lord, sixty years and still
My arteries of love run sluggish.
Take thou thy little bottle brush of love
And cleanse my vasculars of mean-minded silt.
Mend thou the pump of generosity
And, while keeping me relatively lean,
Make me big-hearted.
Tessa Ransford is probably best known as founder of the Scottish Poetry Library in 1984, and as director of it until its establishment in new premises in 1999, work for which she was awarded an OBE in 2000. Not Just Moonshine (Luath Press, £12.99) comprises her new and selected poems, published to coincide with her 70th birthday.
This poet's themes are motherhood, destiny, nature and love, and her work was praised long ago by Alan Bold for its "unusual purity of vision". Intellectually, the best of these poems have a spiritual dimension that owes something to the thinking of Simone Weil and Charles Williams concerning a "co-inherence" to be perceived under appearances. This gives the verse integrity – Ransford always sounds as if she means it.
No-one has done more for the memory of the poet WS Graham than his long-term friend Anthony Astbury, whose Memories of WS Graham and Nessie Dunsmuir (Mailer Press, £10) should be acquired by anyone with an interest in poets and their marriages. In total, 80 of Astbury's own poems are brought together in his More Verses and Apothegms (Ashby Lane Press, £7.50), showing that this most diffident of modern poets is the real thing, a genuine original. I am haunted by his one-line poem entitled "Jewish Boy Before Nazi Firing Squad", which goes in its entirety: "Am I standing straight enough, grandfather?" The same laconic intensity pervades the whole. Sydney Graham (and Burns for that matter) would surely have approved.
… and Tam o'Shanter tooA limited edition of Burns's iconic poem comes with the late Alexander Goudie's dramatic paintingsLOOK, for a moment, at these paintings. At the drunk Tam o'Shanter (left), putting a foot in one of Meg's stirrups, the other foot either about to give way beneath him or swing over the mare's back; at the moment crossing the Doon (above) when he knows he's cheated death; at the realisation of what he's been through when back in Alloway (right).
Three paintings, three styles, three techniques, all by Alexander Goudie. Look at the main image and see its sheer energy; at the last in our sequence, and see how easily Goudie fits into a line of figurative painters, from Courbet through to Peter Howson. Look at the departure from the inn, with its boozily swaying buildings, and you realise the brilliance of Goudie's draughtsmanship, which has been remarked upon since his student days at the Glasgow School or Art.
Put all three together, add the other 51 Tam o'Shanter paintings by Goudie, and you have an unparalleled achievement in 20th-century Scottish painting. Because even though the great and the good, from the Queen to Billy Connolly, sat in front of his easel, it is for this sequence of paintings – on which he'd "given free rein to my wildest imagination" – that Goudie (who died aged 70 in 2004) is best remembered.
Whether or not you agree with Alan Riach that "Tam o'Shanter" is "the central poem in Scottish poetry", it is certainly rare in inspiring art on this scale. While literature was a regular source of subjects for painting in the 19th century, and scenes from "Tam o'Shanter" were illustrated by artists such as Glasgow engraver John Burnett, it was only with Goudie's acclaimed 1996 Edinburgh Festival exhibition – when the tradition of painting literary scenes was all but dead – that "Tam o'Shanter" received the artistic treatment it deserved.
Yet Burns's poem – written, remember, in exchange for an illustration – turns out to be, at least in Goudie's vivid imagination, a haunting subject.
• A 700-copy limited edition of Tam o'Shanter, incorporating all the Goudie paintings now at Rozelle House in Ayrshire, is available direct from publishers Birlinn, priced £100. Edited by Lachlan Goudie, it includes essays by Ted Cowan and Alan Riach.
