Best Scottish Poems 2020: English

When reading poetry from 2020, one cannot disguise the pandemic’s inception into our lives, for it is the poets who best document the zeitgeist. We all felt the transformation, perhaps even tectonically, but poets absorb it, and what they create from this marination is a unified mass of healing through polyvocal, or painterly, narrative passages. To not engage in odes to mortality at this time would only mistranslate the testament of everything that we learnt in the interim, because as the reaper knocked us back with its new accelerated choreography, as we learnt of another cause of death on the great humanitarian register we discovered that one more way to die only instilled a million new ways to live. 

We shifted exponentially in the silence, aching for human touch, or pretended not to; but what we lacked to condone in the flesh, we touched with words, were touched ourselves in the sentiment of their meaning. But, it is not a grim scrapbook at the helm, instead one brimming with desire, optimism and lucidity. These poems here, written mostly by women, are illuminations; spectacles, portals to truth, symphonic telling snapshots of our time, laden with logopoeia, spellbound with phanopoeia and heisted into the most beautiful lyrical voices that odyssey from contemporary Scotland.

In this world of words we honour our suffering, pay respects to our dead, and a conscious uprising is a poetic paradigm that cannot be ignored. In times of chaos, we look for substance, reasons, data, but also on a deeper profound level we seek the spiritual for a place to rest the algorithms of the busy mind, we apply for transcendence. Like every creator, our art is our coping mechanism as we wade through uncertainties. Poetry is not a hobby, it’s a sense of autonomy, a life commitment and just as an artist might experiment with spectrums of colour, poets learn craft techniques for movement, measurement, sound and visual aesthetic in text. The craft of poetry by no means castrates any creative potential, at the core, they each recognise that the pursuit of poetry is an actual life experience, not a cool-tempered technique at all.