What do we collect?
Whilst you’ll find thousands of poems on our website, at our premises in Edinburgh we have an even larger collection. You can search this collection in our Online Catalogue. The list of poetry periodicals we take can be found here.
In our collections we have poems from Scotland and the rest of the world: as well as caring for Scotland’s own poetry, we also work to provide access to international poetry for Scotland’s readers. Our collection focuses primarily on contemporary poetry — poetry from 1950 onward, but we do hold representative works from earlier periods. We have a strong focus on European poetry and poetry in translation, too.
We also have a children’s collection: there is poetry for younger readers, with nursery rhymes and funny poems, babies’ books and scary verse all jostling on the shelves upstairs. Older children are well catered for with anthologies graded for different age groups, and hundreds of individual authors’ works in the Junior section, and a bridge section for young adults in with the main collections.
Our collections are format neutral, which means we collect poetry published in Large Print, braille, on CD, cassette, vinyl, on a postcard, or online.
