Best Scottish Poems 2023: English

The poems selected for this year’s Scottish Poetry Library’s Best of anthology were chosen from hundreds of eligible entries. Their appeal lay in something intangible just below the surface. Something that kept me returning to them as I worked my way through the list, something that kept calling me back for one more look, often hours after I had stepped away from my desk. 

These were the poems that followed me to the swimming pool on Saturday mornings, around the shops on Sundays, poems that walked with me after I had dropped my children off at school, poems that whispered inspiration in my ear as I walked around to collect them at the end of the day. 

The best poetry is not the most complex, the most revered, the most obscure, ancient or contemporary. The best poetry is the poetry that brings itself into the canon of your own life and alters everything  – so very slightly or significantly – as it makes space for itself. I picked these poems because, in the weeks I have been reading them, they have become reference points in my own life: I have thought of them when talking with friends, colleagues, neighbours; I have quoted them to myself when watching films and reading the news; I have recalled them fondly when returning to the places I first read them – the café, the pool side seating, the click and collect parking bay.