Best Scottish Poems 2021: English
edited by Hugh McMillan
It’s a grand thing choosing the Best Scottish Poems of 2021 and an education too, I have to say. Decaying gently down here by the Scaur I have a very tenuous grip on the poetry scene so some of these poets were unfamiliar to me on first reading. Now I’m more aware, and a lot more jealous.
The sea is a theme in some of these poems. Largely landlocked for the last year I’ve been yearning for it myself. Like the tide, poems come and go but some are left lodged in the rocks of our imagination. There are buses and hospitals, too, though. Frogs. Horror. And maybe most importantly, foam.
I am affected most by the poems that tell truths and that come from that cliché, the heart. I like poets who tell stories and reveal themselves. I like poets who have a sense of place and its people. I like poets who take on the world because it is such a crap and unjust place, but I respect poets who given all that retreat into self. I like poets whose words flow or fly or stick in the throat. These are my inclinations but there are poems here, that simply demanded to be included, which don’t fit in these cosy parameters. There are people out there taking liberties with language and construction, shaking up the poem like a snow globe.
This has been another year of poetry in a pandemic. We are all still wary, many of us wounded. Covid has given us an idea of what fear and misery feels like but there are people here and elsewhere who routinely suffer repression, starvation, discrimination. Poets should very much be on edge, operating in these areas. If not fighting, then feeling these things. The overwhelming feeling in the poems I looked at, was introspection. We’re not fully emerging yet. Maybe next year.
Having said that there are some fantastic poems here which engage as well as search within. Scotland is brimmed full of talent, from tip to tip. This is my selection from what I’ve sniffed out and what I’ve been led to but there are probably a couple of thousand as good written or spoken or thought of last year by folk who submitted to magazines I didn’t look at, or which weren’t submitted to magazines at all. I detect a huge interest in poetry, generally. The base is broadening out which can only be a good thing. I’m not sure in a highly democratised poetry universe we should still be harking after ‘best-ofs’, or predictable lists compiled by old hacks. There is still a hierarchy trying to tell us all who we should like, who we should give prizes to, who we should be setting up over us all. I don’t think we should be buying into all that stuff, though I can clearly see what’s in it for the elect. Or the lazy. In short I don’t know, or care, if these poems are the best, my best, or your best. These are exciting and moving pieces that show skill, honesty insight and passion. And innovation in form and meaning. And foam! Well done the poets! Well done all poets!
Read the poems
- All my words
by Regi Claire - and he held me in his palms
by Mina Moriarty - BJ 581 in Birka
by Vivien Jones - Earthstruck
by Jim Carruth - Flying Bats
by Hannah Lavery - Foam theory
by Maria Sledmere - from Achanalt
by Donald S. Murray - Glasgow Coma Scale
by Morag Anderson - Goldcrest
by Tom Pow - Historic Reoccurence
by Lucille Mona Ling - How to burn a woman
by Claire Askew - How to eat frogs
by Clementine E. Burnley - Islander
by W. N. Herbert - Stop
by Graham Fulton - The Grass Boat
by Imogen Forster - The Shepherdess
by Molly Vogel - Treasure Island
by Aoife Lyall - Walk
by K Patrick - What the Clyde said, after COP26
by Kathleen Jamie