Best of the Best Scottish Poems

Making choices like these is rough but exciting. Getting around 300 poems down to 20 was hard indeed, because even when the cream rose to the top and settled, as it did eventually, there was a last separation. Was the poem complete, in feeling and form? Did that little shock from the first reading somehow persist? Most of all, could you pick up a lasting throb of authenticity?

It should go without saying that this list might change in my mind the day after tomorrow, as it probably would for any reader, because we’re dealing here with poets who’ve all reached the same level – like many others who’re not in this selection – and who therefore deserve equal attention, and a listening. They speak side by side. But enough apology, and girning. We’re stepping into rich pasture here. These are all writers who rise from Scottish soil, or have a close connection with it, and who illustrate with gusto and pride how that sense of place and culture is always, at its best, universal.

Reading back through the Scottish Poetry Library annual lists since 2004 I found a consistently generous and outlooking spirit, whether springing from a moment in the hills or on the river, an afternoon with a lover, or an argument in a pub. For those of us who grew up with MacCaig and Crichton Smith, Mackay Brown and Garioch and listened at their feet – with MacDiarmid himself always seeming to hover round the corner, glowering away – it’s exhilarating to be reminded year on year how that tradition (what an awkward and maybe useless word that is) thrives, and in thunderingly good shape.

These poems make that obvious. Edwin Morgan in his last years talking about love, Don Paterson and Jen Hadfield writing in a way that we recognise on the instant to be quintessentially Scottish, Alexander Hutchison staring the past straight in the face and then taking an entrancing detour, Eunice Buchanan giving Ariadne a Scots voice, Robin Robertson remembering a north-east youth, Kathleen Jamie catching a sense of national belonging in a few short lines – these and the other poems here are precious fragments to keep. Together they’re a mosaic into which we all somehow fit. The language is beguiling but also goes straight to the heart, the imagery subtle and brutal all at once. Forget about the formalities of rhyme and metre: when a poem works you know it for what it is, if you only let it breathe.

These lines – long or short, pastoral or social, rough or smooth – take you across boundaries and break down walls along the way. Troubling or reassuring (and usually both), they help us to understand who we are. And for better or worse, we know them to be our own.

James Naughtie

James Naughtie is best known as a former presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today, which he co-presented between 1994 and 2015. Born in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, he joined the Aberdeen Press & Journal in 1975, beginning a stellar career in journalism. Two years later, he moved to the Scotsman, where he became Chief Political Correspondent. After a stint holding the same position at the Guardian, Naughtie moved into radio presenting in 1986, hosting The Week in Westminster before moving to The World at One in 1988. After 21 years of co-hosting Today, Naughtie announced he would retire from regular presenting duties and would, instead, becomes a ‘Special Correspondent’ with ‘responsibility for charting the course of the constitutional changes at the heart of the UK political debate’, as well as BBC News’s Books Editor, contributing a book segment to the Saturday morning editions of Today and hosting Radio 4’s Bookclub.