Best Scottish Poems 2019: English

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.

If you scroll down the poems pages, you’ll see that not only do they each have comments made by Watt and the author, they often are accompanied by a recording of the poem read by the poet (just scroll to the very bottom of the page). One recording in particular struck me. If you listen to Veronica Aaronson’s recording of ‘The Art of Listening’, you’ll hear the sound of birdsong, clear and melodic. We have lost so much because of the lockdown, and the poems remind us of that, but there have been some small but not unimportant gains; in this context, we can hear the birds again. Let us hope the lockdown has left a greater space for our poets’ songs to be heard too.