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  • Best Scottish Poems 2020: English
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Best Scottish Poems 2020: English

edited by Janette Ayachi

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. 

There is a subjective condition in making art, its chance at life relies on sensitising oneself to the pattern of emotions as we decode enigmas attached to our deepest feelings. If one poet nails it on the head, it hammers into the ears and hearts of the whole human condition. Poets are observers in the grand observatory of living, all observations presuppose knowledge so that what we learn becomes our apparatus, and, by tuning our senses and craft, these perceptions become poetry. These 20 poets of 2020 are prime examples of such polished and exquisite behaviours at the frontier who captured what most even feared to imagine during this year, let alone write down and articulate so curiously well.

Janette Ayachi

The SPL could not have published BSP 2020 without the help of the following volunteers. Our volunteers are an integral part of the running of the SPL and we thank them for their time, resources and good cheer.

Rhiannon Auriol
Karyn Wilson Costa
Fred Johnson
Lily Martin
Molly McCracken
Jemma Ward
Dave Wylie

Read more

Read the poems

  • Love in the time of Lexapro
    by Rhiannon Auriol
  • Lockdown in a Bedroom
    by Sheena Blackhall
  • The World Shrinking
    by Anna Crowe
  • Story
    by Imtiaz Dharker
  • The Turquoise Slipper
    by Vicki Feaver
  • from Coronaworld
    by Graham Fulton
  • The Whitby
    by Roshni Gallagher
  • WHAT IF THE MAJOLICA PLATE
    by Jane Goldman
  • Homeschooling
    by Carolyn Jess-Cooke
  • Good with our hands
    by Leyla Josephine
  • Fragments from Children’s Age
    by Ioannis Kalkounos
  • Dredging the Baotou Lake
    by Daisy Lafarge
  • Headlamps
    by Marjorie Lotfi
  • The Future
    by Rob A. Mackenzie
  • No fellow-travellers
    by Richie McCaffery
  • Lifestream
    by Maria Sledmere
  • Summer
    by Alexander McCall Smith
  • Waving
    by Gerda Stevenson
  • Japanese Wind Telephone
    by Sarah Stewart
  • Song of the Sevens
    by Heather H. Yeung
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