scottish

14d

“O’er a’ my labours sey your skill”
10 Sep, University of Glasgow – free

In this new poetry collection, across Scots, Gaelic and English, a wealth of contemporary poets respond to the work of the 18th-century Edinburgh poet Robert Fergusson.

This celebration will include readings of Fergusson's poetry, poets reading their own works responding to Fergusson, & discussion of Fergusson's life & legacy.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/glasgow-book-launch-and-celebration-oer-a-my-labours-sey-your-skill-tickets-1567701109219

#Scottish #literature #poetry #RobertFergusson #18thcentury

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18d

• in the beginning was the sound •

A 🎂 🧵 for Tom Leonard (1944–2018) – born #OTD, 22 August

📷: Front cover of Tom Leonard’s Intimate Voices 1965–1983 (Newcastle: Galloping Dog Press, 1984)

1/3

https://www.tomleonard.co.uk

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Glasgow #Glaswegian #voice #Scots #Scotslanguage #TomLeonard

A pale green book cover. In the middle is a white rectangle. A large red stamp displays the book title, canted at a slight angle: TOM LEONARD: INTIMATE VOICES: 1965–1983. Above the title is a poem, set as if typed on a typewriter:

• in the beginning was the word •
in thi beginning was thi wurd
in thi beginnin was thi wurd
in thi biginnin was thi wurd
n thi biginnin wuz thi wurd
nthi biginnin wuz thi wurd
nthi biginnin wuzthi wurd
nthibiginnin wuzthiwurd nthibiginninwuzthiwurd
• in the beginning was the sound •

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18d

And their judges spoke with one dialect,
but the condemned spoke with many voices.

And the prisons were full of many voices,
but never the dialect of the judges.

And the judges said:
“No-one is above the Law.”

—Tom Leonard, “And the judges said”
published in Situations Theoretical and Contemporary (Galloping Dog Press, 1986)

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Glasgow #Glaswegian #voice #Scots #Scotslanguage #TomLeonard

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17d

yi mist yirsell so yi did
we aw skiptwirr ferz njumptaffit thi lights
YIZIR AW PINE THEY FERZ THIMORRA
o it wizza scream
thaht big shite wiz dayniz nut…

—Tom Leonard, “A Scream”
from Six Glasgow Poems (1967)

(rrose sounds like a proper caution, by the way)

https://www.tomleonard.co.uk/online-poetry-and-prose.html

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Glasgow #Glaswegian #voice #Scots #Scotslanguage #TomLeonard

A Scream
Tom Leonard

yi mist yirsell so yi did
we aw skiptwirr ferz njumptaffit thi lights
YIZIR AW PINE THEY FERZ THIMORRA
o it wizza scream
thaht big shite wiz dayniz nut

tellnyi jean
we wirraw shoutn backit im
rrose shoutit shi widny puhllit furra penshin
o yi shooda seeniz face
hi didny no wherrty look

thing iz tay
thirz nay skool thimorra
thi daft kunt wullny even getiz bluddy ferz

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17d

I like seeing nurse frieda knitting
as I like watching my wife knitting
as I liked watching my mother knitting
though she was more of a dabber
(plain and purl, plain and purl)…

—“in hospital” by Tom Leonard

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/hospital/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #TomLeonard

in hospital
Tom Leonard

I like seeing nurse frieda knitting
as I like watching my wife knitting
as I liked watching my mother knitting
though she was more of a dabber
(plain and purl, plain and purl)

it’s not
“women being in their place”
or knitting the chains that keep them down

just

the future, knitting the future
the present peaceful, quiet
as if

the same woman knitting
for a thousand years

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17d

efturryd geenuz iz speel
iboot whut wuz right
nwhut wuz rang
boot this nthat
nthi nix thing
a sayzti the bloke
nwhut izzit yi caw
yir joab jimmy…

—Tom Leonard, “liason coordinator”
from GHOSTIE MEN (Galloping Dog Press, 1980)

https://www.tomleonard.co.uk/online-poetry-and-prose/liasoncoordinator.html

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Glasgow #Glaswegian #Scots #Scotslanguage #TomLeonard

efturryd geenuz iz speel
iboot whut wuz right
nwhut wuz rang
boot this nthat
nthi nix thing

a sayzti the bloke
nwhut izzit yi caw
yir joab jimmy

am a liason co-ordinator
hi sayz oh good ah sayz
a liason co-ordinator

jist whut this erria needs
whut way aw thi unimploymint
inaw thi bevvyin
nthi boayz runnin amock
nthi hoossyz fawnty bits
nthi wummin n tranquilisers
it last thiv sent uz
a liason co-ordinator

sumdy wia digree
in fuck knows whut
get peyd fur no known
whut thi fuck ti day way it

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17d

one of those with quiet, naturally restrained, insistently monotoned voices

with that little selfcontained smile, always going on about Respect for History and the Abiding Sense of the Traditional…

—Tom Leonard, “The Elect”
published in MARKINGS 27, 2008

https://www.tomleonard.co.uk/online-poetry-and-prose/the-elect.html

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #TomLeonard

The Elect
Tom Leonard

one of those with quiet, naturally restrained, insistently monotoned voices

with that little self-contained smile, always going on about Respect for History and the Abiding Sense of the Traditional

who want all poets to have a sense of “basic form” and who are always quoting Yeats’s “Under Ben Bulben” about poets having to Learn Their Trade and not be All Out of Shape from Toe to Top

who think this has nothing to do with Yeats’s views on eugenics – "the better stocks have not been replacing their numbers” – “The results are already visible in the degeneration of literature” –

who complain of people with voices yclept loud, varied, opinionated, up and down, showy, the insufferably “engaged”, the political johnnies, the performance crowd, the “disastrous influence of the sixties”

who hate poets who carry electrical appliances and who cling fast to Aristotle’s dictum that a poet is a poet insofar as they have a command of metaphor

who do not want to know all this stuff about “the page as a field of semantic tension” or blethers about “the connection between lower case and democracy” or pontificatory nonsense about “the punctuation of spacing” and “the reader being present at the shared point of articulation”

one of them leant over and said to me quietly

do you know if the 44 bus still goes to Knightswood

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17d

“Don’t you find
the use of phonetic urban dialect
rather constrictive?”

—Tom Leonard, “Fathers and Sons”
published in Intimate Voices: Selected Work, 1965–1983 (Galloping Dog Press, 1984)

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #TomLeonard

FATHERS AND SONS
Tom Leonard

I remember being ashamed of my father
when he whispered the words out loud
reading the newspaper.

“Don’t you find
the use of phonetic urban dialect
rather constrictive?”
asks a member of the audience.

The poetry reading is over.
I will go home to my children.

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18d

this is thi
six a clock
news thi
man said n
thi reason
a talk wia
BBC accent
iz coz yi
widny wahnt
mi ti talk
aboot thi
trooth wia
voice lik
wanna yoo
scruff. if
a toktaboot
thi trooth
lik wanna yoo
scruff yi
widny thingk
it wuz troo.
jist wanna yoo
scruff tokn.

—Tom Leonard, “The Six O’Clock News”
🎂 Tom Leonard, 22 Aug 1944

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Glasgow #Glaswegian #voice #Scots #Scotslanguage #TomLeonard

The Six O’Clock News
Tom Leonard

this is thi
six a clock
news thi
man said n
thi reason
a talk wia
BBC accent
iz coz yi
widny wahnt
mi ti talk
aboot thi
trooth wia
voice lik
wanna yoo
scruff. if
a toktaboot
thi trooth
lik wanna yoo
scruff yi
widny thingk
it wuz troo.
jist wanna yoo
scruff tokn.
thirza right
way ti spell
ana right way
to tok it. this
is me tokn yir
right way a
spellin. this
is ma trooth.
yooz doant no
thi trooth
yirsellz cawz
yi canny talk
right. this is
the six a clock
nyooz. belt up.

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17d

Starlings return
black commas spill from the sky
festooning rooftops
like coal-coloured bunting…

—Nalini Paul, “August”
published in The Flight of the Turtle: New Writing Scotland 29 (ASL, 2011)

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry

Nalini Paul
AUGUST

Starlings return
black commas spill from the sky
festooning rooftops
like coal-coloured bunting.

The blue, yellow and red have gone.
The County Show outshone Shopping Week
by a well-ploughed mile
and heralded winter.

Black cattle, smudges of soot
in the browning fields.

Sunlight spreads
like toffee melting;
blinds drawn by nine.

The wind comes home again
with rain for company
whips the sea back to life
fills the streets with dark song.

Storms wipe the slate of the year clean
as if summer had never been.

But the last few midge bites
still itch.

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16d

Brutalised Africans made Glasgow
amazing disgrace, how sweet the civic amnesia…
mansions without plaques
unrevised street names
no memorial.

—Kate Tough, “People Made Glasgow”

“A contemporary sickness has its roots in unredressed wrongs”

Today, 23 August, is the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade & its Abolition

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/people-made-glasgow/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Glasgow #slavery #abolition #SlaveryHistory #RememberSlavery

People Made Glasgow
Kate Tough

Shame in our hulls
why else would we drink to incoherence
jump on the heads of passing men
punch our women
tell our children in a checkout queue,
‘Ah hate bank holidays cuz it means
Ah huftae look at youse fir three days no two.’

The whip’s crack
comes a little after
the whip’s stroke.

People Make Glasgow
obese, rotten-mouthed
stroke-felled, emphysemic
tumour-choked
aye, an proud ae it.
What we murdered them for
we kill ourselves with.

The whip’s crack
comes a little after
the whip’s stroke.

Brutalised Africans made Glasgow
amazing disgrace, how sweet
the civic amnesia…
mansions without plaques
unrevised street names
no memorial.
So, sign-up for the new city tour –

The Glasgow Merchant Experience!
below deck on the Waverley
100 unclothed families
close-chained to plank beds
30 dead since it left Dunoon!
On the dock, a real live auction!
Feel the excitement as you bid
for your very own slave!

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15d

John Maclean (1879–1923), socialist & Red Clydesider, was born #OTD, 24 August

Listen to Hamish Henderson’s “The John Maclean March”, sung by Dick Gaughan (1972)
✊

1/3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uAs5cyy5EM

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #song #folksong #socialism #Scotland #workingclass #history #labourhistory #RedClydeside #HamishHenderson #JohnMaclean

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14d

Novelist, historian, & politician John Buchan (1875–1940) – from son of the manse to Governor-General of Canada – was born #OTD, 26 Aug
A 🎂 🧵

Nick Rankin examines Buchan’s literary legacy in THE BUCHAN TRADITION – currently available on BBC Sounds

1/8

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05qjq6h

#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #JohnBuchan

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13d

…but witness these brittle August
bluebells casting seed,
like tiny hearts in caskets
tossed onto a battle ground.

—Kathleen Jamie, “Reliquary”
published in THE TREE HOUSE (Picador, 2004)

1/4

https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/kathleen-jamie/the-tree-house/9781509891825

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #history

Reliquary
by Kathleen Jamie

The land we inhabit opens to reveal
the stain of ancient settlements,
plague pits where we’d lay
our fibre-optic cables;

but witness these brittle August
bluebells casting seed,
like tiny hearts in caskets
tossed onto a battle ground.

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13d

SCOTTISH LITERARY REVIEW 17/1
Spring/Summer 2025

Special issue

Scotland’s Branches: Language, Literature & Culture across Time

Guest edited by Gioia Angeletti & Marina Dossena

Now online FREE on Open Access via Project MUSE

@litstudies

https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/55288

#Scottish #literature #literarystudies #culturalstudies

A yellow journal cover with black lettering:

SCOTTISH
LITERARY
REVIEW

Spring | Summer 2025
Journal of the Association for Scottish Literature

The cover illustration shows an open book, lying on its back, with four stylised, twisty thistles growing from between its fanned pages.

Contents

Editorial

Alessandra Petrina – On the Margins: Early Modern Scottish Writing

Allison L. Steenson – ‘Nusquam Audita’: Mary, Queen of Scots, the Hawthornden Manuscripts, and the Union of the Crowns

Licia Masoni – Revisiting the Past for Young Readers: Retellings of Traditional Tales in Scottish Picturebooks

Manuela D’Amore – Past and Current Trends in Italian Scottish Migration Writings: Time and Memory in Joe Pieri and Anne Pia

Gioia Angeletti – The Future of the Past: Revisionism, Theatricality, and National Identity in Three Scottish Plays from the 1970s to 2010

Notes on Contributors

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12d

A CHAOS OF LIGHT
New Writing Scotland 43
Ed. by Kirstin Innes, Chris Powici & Niall O’Gallagher

“writing that unsettles and challenges, that questions assumptions and gets us to look at, when it feels so much less painful to look away… A rich, boisterous, tender, charming, angry, sorrowful, gleeful mix”

Available now from all good bookshops!

@bookstodon
@writingcommunity

https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/newwriting/nws43/

#Scottish #literature #poetry #shortstories #shortfiction #newwriting #writingcommunity

Book cover

A Chaos of Light
New Writing Scotland 43

Edited by Kirstin Innes and Chris Powici
Gaelic Editor: Niall O'Gallagher

A dark purple-black cover. The book title is in pale yellow. A beam of white light rises up from the foot of the cover, forming the letter I in LIGHT. It hits the bottom of the capital A in CHAOS – represented by an upwards-pointing solid triangle – and a burst of colour emerges from the right-hand side of the triangle, as if light was passing through a prism. Multicoloured sparkles rise from the right-hand edge of the cover where the spectrum of light hits it.

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10d

Some days were running legs and joy
and old men telling tomorrow would be
a fine day surely: for sky was red
at setting of sun between the hills…

—Iain Crichton Smith, “Some days were running legs”
published in Deer on the High Hills (Carcanet 2021)

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800170940/deer-on-the-high-hills/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #IainCrichtonSmith

‘Some days were running legs’
Iain Crichton Smith

Some days were running legs and joy
and old men telling tomorrow would be
a fine day surely: for sky was red
at setting of sun between the hills.

Some nights were parting at the gates
with day’s companions: and dew falling
on heads clear of ambition except light
returning and throwing stones at sticks.

Some days were rain flooding forever the green
pasture: and horses turning to the wind
bare smooth backs. The toothed rocks rising
sharp and grey out of the ancient sea.

Some nights were shawling mirrors lest the lightning
strike with the eel’s speed out of the storm.
Black the roman rooks came from the left squawking
and the evening flowed back around their wings.

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10d

“…my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee…”
—Mary Shelley, introduction to FRANKENSTEIN (1831 edn)

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was born #OTD, 30 August. Prof Daniel Cook examines why Scotland mattered so much to Mary Shelley, & considers Shelley’s position in the Scottish Gothic tradition

@litstudies

https://www.nls.uk/collections/stories/literature-and-poetry/mary-shelley-and-the-scottish-gothic-tradition/

#Scottish #literature #gothic #Frankenstein #FrankensteinDay #MaryShelley

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12d

In his darkroom he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

—Carol Ann Duffy, “War Photographer”
published in COLLECTED POEMS (Picador, 2019)

https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/carol-ann-duffy/collected-poems/9781447231752

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #warpoetry #photography #journalism

War Photographer
by Carol Ann Duffy

In his darkroom he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays
beneath his hands, which did not tremble then
though seem to now. Rural England. Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet
of running children in a nightmare heat.

Something is happening. A stranger’s features
faintly start to twist before his eyes,
a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
of this man’s wife, how he sought approval
without words to do what someone must
and how the blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black-and-white
from which his editor will pick out five or six
for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick
with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.
From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns his living and they do not care.

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9d

100 years of women’s lives & writings workshop
23 Sep, online – free

The National Library of Scotland will discuss literature & archives in the library that are inspired by the lives of women. The examples chosen are from the NLS’s ‘Dear Library’ centenary exhibition.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/100-years-of-womens-lives-and-writings-workshop-tickets-1003525460667

#Scottish #literature #writing #womenwriters #archives

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11d

Opening Lines: TREASURE ISLAND

On BBC Sounds: former Head of Channel Four Drama & Controller of BBC Drama Production John Yorke explains why Robert Louis Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND has a profound & lasting impact even in the age of Minecraft, Reality TV & YouTube

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002hl0j

#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #Victorian #RobertLouisStevenson #Kidlit #ChildrensLiterature #TreasureIsland

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9d

Old gods and goddesses who have lived so long
Through time and never found eternity,
Fettered by wasting wood and hollowing hill,
You should have fled our ever-dying song…

—Edwin Muir, “To the Old Gods”
📷 Ballachulish Figure, c728–524 BCE

https://www.nms.ac.uk/discover-catalogue/a-mysterious-iron-age-figure-from-ballachulish

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #archaeology #IronAge #EdwinMuir

To the Old Gods
by Edwin Muir

Old gods and goddesses who have lived so long
Through time and never found eternity,
Fettered by wasting wood and hollowing hill,

You should have fled our ever-dying song,
The mound, the well, and the green trysting tree.
They have forgotten, yet you linger still.

Goddess of caverned breast and channeled brow,
And cheeks slow hollowed by millennial tears,
Forests of autumn fading in your eyes,

Eternity marvels at your counted years
And kingdoms lost in time, and wonders how
There could be thoughts so bountiful and wise

As yours beneath the ever-breaking bough
And vast compassion curving like the skies.

An early Iron Age wooden carved figure of a woman or girl, standing in front of a wall of woven twigs and branches. The figure is blackened with age, and the wood has twisted and elongated due to the lack of proper preservation when it was discovered in a peatbog in 1880. Carved from a single block of alder, at the time of its discovery it stood 1.4 metres tall (just under 5 feet). The figure has a large, heavy head with inset quartz pebbles for eyes, large ears, a distinct nose and mouth and a round chin.

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10d

I pulled all my mother’s expectations
with me, like a child’s kite, giddy with stir
of spring…

—Lynn Valentine, “St Kilda Crossing”
from DON’T. EVEN. ASK. TOO. HOT.: New Writing Scotland 42 (ASL, 2024)

Today, 29 August, marks the 95th anniversary of the final evacuation of St Kilda. People had lived there for over 2000 years but, by the early 20th century, life had become too difficult to sustain. In 1930 the islanders petitioned for help to leave

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #StKilda

ST KILDA CROSSING
by Lynn Valentine

I pulled all my mother’s expectations
with me, like a child’s kite, giddy with stir
of spring. Because she was cancer-cracked
I turned tourist by proxy, crouched into cleits
looking for leavings of last century.

I photographed fawn smallness of Soays
felt the crash of wind-whipped stacs,
my pockets salt-filled. I leant
on those islands as my mother leant on me,
filled my lungs with their breeze
and leaping green language of sea.

I tried to hold my breath for days,
took it back to my mother, exhaled
island air on her weakened frame –
whispered broken stories of birds and rain.

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10d

Whan du telt me hoo du thowt o ‘luck’
as nae mair as chance, de happy hubbelskju
o aentropie, I thowt onnly o de ben-end
o my grandmidder’s hoose an aa her talismans
o tat…

—Roseanne Watt, “Lukkie”

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/lukkie/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Shetland #Shetlandic #Scots #Scotslanguage

Lukkie
Roseanne Watt

Whan du telt me hoo du thowt o ‘luck’
as nae mair as chance, de happy hubbelskju
o aentropie, I thowt onnly o de ben-end
o my grandmidder’s hoose an aa her talismans
o tat. Inbi, luck wis acht an lenned lik coins,
hot fae de löf. Dere wis wyes aboot it:
a sixpence fir de scratchcairds; tree skoilts
o a gingernut wid gie dee a wish; a dram
onnly ivvir gied sungaets roond de room.
Ee time, ower supper, shö telt me hoo shö won
an aamos fae a haafman; a beaded bag
fir a skurtfoo o her luck at sea. I browt him
tae de dance dat week, but someen took him
fae de cloakroom. Less. Dere’s joost some tings
dat du canna keep a haad o. Dat’s true enoff.
It seems tae me wir luck his aye been wattir
cupped by hands at prayer, in a langwich
at his mair wirds fir ill-luckit tings as fair.
Nivir leet, shö says. De lotto’s demoarn.
Can I git dee a gingernut?

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5d

Aye Write 2025
6–16 November, Glasgow

Tickets are now on sale for Aye Write, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year with a packed programme featuring 180 writers from Scotland & around the world

https://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/whats-on/aye-write

#Scottish #literature #books #bookfestival #Glasgow #AyeWrite

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